


Price of Forgiveness

by BirchBow (chaoticTenebrism)



Series: Price of Forgiveness [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aftercare, Aftermath of Torture, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, BDSM, Canon-Typical Violence, Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Healthy Relationships, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kink Meme, M/M, Masochism, Other, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Porn With Plot, Relationship Negotiation, SO MUCH Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs you guys there's so much of it help it keeps growing, Sadism, Size Difference, Size Kink, Troll Pupation/Cocooning, Worldbuilding, not in the main pairing because the main pairing is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:24:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 330,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticTenebrism/pseuds/BirchBow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You just curl up and shiver once he’s gone, just imagining again how big and rough his hands are, what he could do to you, what he //did// do to you--with just a twitch of his hand he broke your bones, when you can barely get your own claws to pierce your own skin.  He could hurt you, really hurt you, not just raise stinging purple welts on your skin and bite not quite hard enough to satisfy.  Big as he is, he could crumple you up like a broken puppet and hurt you until you saw god.</p><p>He could //ruin// you.</p><p>Kink Meme Prompt: consensual sadomasochistic/BDSM Makaracest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Until I See God

**Author's Note:**

> Kink Meme Prompt: 
> 
> I see a lot of non-con and violence and terrible things centered around the GHB--which kind of makes sense, he's an awful dude. But there's not a lot of purple-bloods around to be raping and torturing and killing etc., and juggalos put a lot of emphasis on family and community, and I just thought it would be really interesting to see a GHB who's horrible and brutal and sadistic to everybody but his precious brothers and sisters of the church. And then this kid comes along wearing his sign, who never learned it isn't normal to get off on pain and/or the thought of what the church does to captured heretics.
> 
> tl;dr Gamzee has a serious thing for pain, especially as a sacrament to his religion, and the GHB has experience and finesse in giving it. Consensual on both ends, and because he's caring for one of his own, GHB is actually (gasp) a great dom.

The kid is eleven sweeps, four sweeps in your holy fleet, when the two of you reach the breaking point.

You know Gamzee Makara is your descendant from the moment you see him, and not just because he’s got your sign on his chest and your same curving goat horns.  He’s got your exact color of blood and your same skinny face and rangy long limbs, and even though he’s built out of a handful of sticks and a chirpbeast’s nest masquerading as a head of hair he’s tall and strong and getting stronger.  You and your church welcome him into the family with all his purple-blooded brothers and sisters from the homeworld below, and the first time he meets your eyes you know with certainty that he feels the jolt that runs through between you.

Whether he knows you as his ancestor, whether he just feels that you have a spot in your pusher that’s vulnerable to him, you don’t know.  But he runs to keep up along side of you every time you come out of your throne room to be with the faithful, he sits in the front for every sermon with eyes full of salvation, for four whole sweeps he comes running at the slightest sign you need one of your brothers or sisters for the most menial of tasks and he smiles at you like you’re the beginning and end of the world.  You take to him just a touch too affectionate for just a favored student, you know—you slip up once, maybe twice, and in among “brat” and “wriggler” and “motherfucker” and “brother” you call him “little one” and only notice when his ears go violet around the edge of his paint. 

Three sweeps in he makes laughsassin training.  Four sweeps, and for the first time you get a moment and come down in person, and you get to make a show of some techniques of holy motherfucking inquisition. 

It surprises you a little still when Gamzee stands up the second “example” comes out of your mouth.  It shouldn’t, anymore, but it does.

“Ain’t nobody wants you to break them,” you’re telling the kids—only a handful.  The class has been weeded out, for all the church does its best to take care of its own.  Everybody can’t make laughsassin, and eventually the weak will out.  You’ve got Gamzee’s arm twisted up, his wrist bent back on itself, showing how you can send a troll into such terrible, terrible fear just by holding on the right way. 

That’s what’s really supposed to be happening, anyway.  He’s not showing any sign of the fear that usually comes on fast and strong when you get someone in a hold like this, is the thing.  His breathing is coming faster, harder, but other than that he shows no sign the hold has him—must be bendable in a terrible way, that you’re bending his bones like this and he’s not crying out mercy. You give another littler push—

_Crack_

Gamzee doesn’t cry out, but he goes tense and frozen all over.  You can feel it in your hands, through all your sweeps you’ve learned the feeling well—his wrist is snapped.  The watchers murmur, all confusion and fear.  “…nnngh,” says Gamzee, and he actually fucking  _grins_  at you, even if it’s a little shaky, a little strange at the edges.  “…oops.  Fuckin’—forgot.  Sorry.”

“ _Forgot_?”  You repeat, and drop his arm.   He winces, but doesn’t cry out—it’s strange, he ain’t reacting at all like you’re used to seeing a wriggler react when you snap a frond.  You don’t have time to think on that, though, because you like to have a good hand on who you hurt and when and hurting your precious little motherfuckin’ brothers and sisters in faith doesn’t stand you well when they haven’t done nothing worth hurting.  You cause pain with  _intention_.  “Hark at the wriggler, all of you!  Eat sopor long enough, you’ll even  _forget_  your wrist’s about to break!  Miracle drug as it is, my motherfuckin’ ninja and ninjettes, you’ll let your brothers and sisters hurt you as they didn’t intend to do!”  You turn back to him, bare all your teeth.  He doesn’t look as happy now—you know for a motherfuckin’ fact he hates it when you throw the sopor thing back in his face, but you’re pissed as all mirthful hells and you don’t give a single gilded imperial _fuck_.  “Listen up, little motherfucker, you let someone snap a bone like that out on a mission you’ll be as good as dead, and any of your brethren as were weighing your life with theirs, _they’ll be fuckin’ dead too._ ”

His smile falls.  “I,” he says, shakier and smaller.  “…sorry.”

“Yeah, well.”  You grab his wrist and hold it up so everyone can see.  “ _Sorry_  don’t fix a broken body, wriggler.  Get your pan-leaking ass to the doctorturer, pan-leak, and don’t you fuckin’ _forget_ again.”

He goes.

You do the rest of the class with another who reacts in a manner much more satisfactory, wincing and yelping and begging off as soon as you get a good hold, but you remember how his bones creaked in your hands and the sharp snap and the way he smiled at you after, and you wonder.  You wonder through the rest of the demonstration, you wonder through evening massacre and you wonder as you interrogate a heretic to their slow demise, wringing out of them why they been tagging hives mutant red.  You  _wonder._

It’s with those wonderings in mind you end up heading down the corridors of your own ship in the middle of the day, no real aim or question in mind, headed to the door with the sign on it identical to your own.  You got no need to knock. 

The block is empty.  You check his ‘coon—slime in it so thin it barely counts as sopor, and made bitter and rank even an addict like him would think a few times before putting it in his maw—but he’s not sleeping, for all it’s getting near midday.  You’re about to go back to your throne room, maybe write up an imperial report on that heretic you inquisitioned (ugh, paperwork, more like _dig your brains out with a culling fork_ ) when you hear a low sound, and catch sight of the barest sliver of light under the doorway.

He’s in his ablution block.  You stroll over, then stop at the door and frown when you hear him groan, very soft but very clear.  They shouldn’t have given him any drugs while they set his wrist, not after he came to you all fucked up on sopor—he must be feeling it pretty hard.

You’re just considering on the kindness of letting him lie as he is when you hear another little groan—and this time it’s words that you hear.

“ _Yes,_ ” he pants, and you’ve been around long enough, you don’t even second-guess what you’re hearing.  You been there a fair number of times over the sweeps you been alive.  Wouldn’t have figured it for the first option after you gone and had your  _fucking wrist broken_ , but maybe they did give him something for it after all.  Some of the drugs they give for pain down in the doctorturer bay can make you twitchy as a hard spell in heat.  “ _Yes, fuck yes, nnh…_ ”

You weigh what’s kind against what’s funny.

“Kind” doesn’t put up much of a fight.

You slam the door open and bellow, “HEY WRIGGLER, HAVING A GOOD MOTHERFUCKING TIME IN HERE?!”  as loud as you know how to yell.  He squawks like a plucked cluckbeast and flounders so hard in shock, he tears down the ablution curtain, then swears up a storm and pulls a towel over his junk and you break down laughing so hard you almost piss yourself.

“ _Watch your mouth!_ ” You wheeze at him, still laughing so hard in between words you can’t hardly breathe, “—don’t wanna—shame the church now, little one, I’ll have to give you hail messiahs all through dinner!”

“Fucking hell!”

“Better than fucking yourself!”  You burst out, and go back to howling laughter.  He goes purple.

“—I—you—fuck you!”

“Better me than you!” 

He groans at the bad joke and you ruffle his hair and laugh.  He’s still shaking and turned on and now he’s frustrated as all hell too—kids.  Dumbass kids.    “Ah go on, you can finish up, I’m just messin’ with you.”

And then you look at him again, and you see a smear of purple blood.  Your laughter dies off.

“…you’re bleedin’, little brother.”

He purples some more.

“—‘m okay,” he mumbles.  You look, you look hard, and see his claws stained purple, his stomach all bleeding in five little trickles from the holes where they’ve been. “You clawed yourself up,” you say, sharp, and he winces.  “What the fuck for?” a thought occurs.  “—what, you getting’ your pitch off in here?”  He had a pitchmate once or twice, right?  You don’t ever try to keep track of how the wind’s blowing for quadrants on your ship until all involved have moved up a few sweeps and stop flipping in and out of squares like it’s a goddamn race.  Must not have a motherfucker to go to now though, who’d choose their own hands in an ablution block if they had a quadrant-mate?  Especially at this age, goddamn.

“ _No,_ ” he grumbles, all snarky and sharp, still frustrated as fuck.  He can’t look up at you.  That option exhausted, your pan passes to the next option as seems most likely to you.

“This about how you… _forgot_  to tell me I was about to snap you?”  He doesn’t answer, and that lack tells you a lot about what he isn’t saying.  You want to cuff him around the horns for being an idiot, but you got no need to beat him up more than he already been beat up.  “You stupid-ass motherfucker,” you say, “…you figure I want you punishing yourself for letting me hurt you?  You got a snapped club arm already, shit-for-brains, the fuck kind of thinking is that?”

“Wasn’t—I was just—I was—” he scratches at his horns and then has to snatch his towel before it can fall down.  He messes with it rather than fix oculars on your face.  “I just.  Just my.  Arm, it ain’t—” he stammers himself out.  You stand and cross your arms and glare at him, not stepping in to finish for him, just waiting.  He groans.  “… _wasn’t enough_ ,” he finishes finally, fast and shaky and quiet. 

“Enough what, exactly.”  You make it real clear with how you’re speakin’ that you ain’t in the mood for him blabbering nonsense at you, as is his wont (and you too, fair enough, you wax filthy-eloquent when you get your go on, but you earned the right). 

He takes a breath and lets it out.

“…pain,” he says.

You stare at him for a good few seconds.  “…what.”

“Pain,” he says again, yeah, you heard him right the first time apparently.  Okay.  “Didn’t hurt enough.”

You think you got the beginning of a pan-ache coming on, and it ain’t helped by how he stands there all lacking of his clothes and with no paint and you can see the scars on him.  See his bulge move under the cloth he got wrapped around him.  See how he holds his arm to him, and remember how he let you break his wrist. 

…he…jerked his arm into your grip, didn’t he.  He didn’t  _let_  you break his wrist.  He broke his arm with your hand, and you’re pissed about that and in some way strung taught in an equal measure.  You ain’t ever been quite right, how it gets you to hurt another troll.  You ain’t quite right, and neither is he but in the other direction.

Yeah.  Definitely getting a pan-ache.

“…get your clothes on,” you tell him, and turn your back on him, heading back to the door.  You’re all in turmoil, you are  _most mightily fraught_ , it’s all simmering inside you waiting to blow.  “…you’ll come see me as soon as you’re dressed.  I’m not tolerating a wait.”

“…’ssir,” he says, real quiet, kind of shaky, and you recall how he always comes forward when you need a volunteer, how close he hangs on every word you say to him, and have to take a tiny little breath. 

You got some things to talk over.  You shouldn’t ever have waited this long.  Your messiahs are watching and laughing, you’re sure, they couldn’t ever watch a motherfucker get a shitload of his own mistake in the face and not laugh…

You don’t turn back, but as you step out the door you hear him shift again, and you hear the soft sound of a moan.

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara and yeah.  Yeah you think you just fucked up really pretty goddamn bad this time.    
  
You can usually read the old man, but when you came right out and said it,  _pain_ , (even just the word, it rolled out of you like a prayer, fuck, just saying that to him is enough to get you dripping all over again) he looked at you like your pitch one-time-stands did, like how they looked at you when instead of making you fight, the pain just made you moan. 

You come in a pretty short margin once he’s gone, just imagining again how big and rough his hands are, what he could do to you, what he  _did_ do to you--with just a twitch of his hand he broke your bones, when you can barely get your own claws to pierce your own skin.  He could hurt you,  _really_  hurt you, not just raise stinging purple welts on your skin and bite not quite hard enough to satisfy.  Big as he is, he could crumple you up like a broken puppet and hurt you until you saw god.

That’s the thought that has you shaking and whimpering on the floor of your ablution block—he could  _ruin_  you, not just hurt you, but  _ruin_  you. 

Your knees are still weak and shaking when you pull on your shittiest old sleeping clothes and head out of the door, slipping down corridors all full of metal and hanging cloth and painted blood to the great huge black doors where the old man bides his time.  There’s never any guards.  You don’t put barkbeasts out to guard the cave of a behemoth.    
  
You been here more times than probably most of your brothers and sisters twice your age, but you have to stop outside the door this time and breathe.  You got an appetite for pain the size of the empire, but fear—fear ain’t your friend.  Terrible coward, you.

You’re afraid.

But he said he didn’t want a wait, so you rest your forehead against the doors to his throne room, take a few long, deep breaths, stand up real straight, and push inside.

The cathedral is all the glory it’s ever been, blood spattered on the walls in bright rainbow smears and drips, banners hanging ragged from the distant roof, hanging lights in lamps made out of glass of all colors.  Takes some of the fear away, looking at all the brilliance and the wonder of it.  Lifts up your soul and makes it sing.

And then you look down and see him, and you come down into your own body hard.  He looks grim as all motherfuck.  Oh right.  You fucked up.  Great, bitchtits,  _wonderful_. 

“Come up here,” he says, and his voice echoes back at you.  You come.  He looks bigger than he has since first you saw him, slouched in his throne, painted up and menacing.  It occurs this must be how they see him, the heretics, the prisoners who are brought here to meet the man who’ll kill them—and goddammit, that thought makes a slow pulse of heat run through you from the soles of your feet, bare on the tiles, to the tips of your horns.   

He watches you walk up to the spot in front of his throne where there a hundred thousand feet have worn a silver hole in the pitch-black paint they’ve coated on the floor.  You kneel, like all of them have, and then straighten up, your right as a member of the caste.  You keep your head bowed. 

“Closer than that,” he growls at you, and your bloodpusher thunders in your ears.  “Up here.”

You don’t trust yourself to speak.  You nod and come forward slowly, until even with your head bowed you can see the foot of his throne, his legs thrown out in front of him.  He’s barefoot too.  His feet are long and grey and bony and so like yours.  You stare at them like if you don’t look at his face you won’t have to deal with how bad you fucked up.

“You like pain,” he says, and it steals breath out of your thorax.  You didn’t know what you expected—straight to the point, straight to the heart of you, why would you ever expect him to ease you into it?  The old man loves his brothers and sisters, but he ain’t ever coddled them. 

“…yessir,” you say, because that’s all you  _can_  say. 

“How long has this been goin’ on?”

You think back and back, to six sweeps, scratching at your arms and legs and belly, shivering at how the sting made your skin run hot and cold.  Trying your claws to yourself, over and over, harder and harder, bleeding so hard you almost passed out and still wanting more.

“…long time.” 

He makes a quiet, considering noise.

“And that was the end you used me to,” he growls, and you flinch.  “I hurt when I  _want_  to hurt and I had no intention to break you like that, little Makara.  I don’t take it well, being pushed to do something I don’t got any need to do.”

“Sorry.”

You can hear the frown in his voice.  “…what I said before, I didn’t know the entirety of it,” he says, “…but it still holds true.   _Sorry_  don’t fix a thing.  Repentance by mouth never saved a soul.”  He pauses.  “...you taken scripture and liturgy yet?”

“Yessir.” You fuckin’  _rock_ at Scripture and Liturgy.  Every word locked into your pan like it was always meant to be there, filled up the holes sopor put in you, lifted you up.  You were more than you were, when they taught you about the gods.

“Finish that line,” he orders, “…repentance by mouth never saved a soul.”

“—spill blood and flesh in price of forgiveness,” you recite back, hardly a second’s pause, and you remember the bloody murals of the messiahs painted up on the walls of that classroom, the splattered, scarlet, glaring eyes.  God, you fucked up so bad.  God.  And worst is that  _spill blood and flesh_  burns in your spine, it throbs in your guts.  “But.  But, in my case particular, like, ain’t any kind of…not much of a…”

“Not a punishment,” he finishes for you, and you nod.  “…noted, wriggler.  We’ll find something you’ll enjoy less so.”

“Yessir,” you say, helpless.  “Thank you.”

“Mm.”

There’s silence.  Then, just as you’re about to fucking burst out of your skin, “…you haven’t got nobody out there willing to hurt you like you want, then.  Don't find that credible, ain’t a single person on this motherfucking fleet who doesn’t have an enemy or five.”

Fuck.  Fuck fuck  _fuck_.

You mumble something that doesn’t even form into words.  He snarls at you, sharp enough it bounces off the walls, and you flinch and—fucking—fuck, great, your bulge is trying for out, you are definitely—you are—so— _god that feels good_ …

“Got someone I want to—uh.”  You should just spit the whole thing out, say the whole thing instead of making him drag it out of you, but he’s  _right there in front of you_ , so motherfucking close you can hear him breathing.  “…not.  Interested.  I think.”

“Yeah?”  He sounds almost like he finds that funny, fuck if you know why, he laughs at what he laughs at.  “You asked them?”

“No.”

“You make it known to them  _at all_?”

“…sort of tried.  A bit.”

He groans.  “I ain’t up for playin’ matchmaker for my fleet, Makara, but goddamn, what is the _worst_  that can fucking happen?  ‘S a discredit to the fleet, pissing around pretending you don’t want to pail somebody who—”

“—could have me thrown off his ship,” you say, so fast the words all seem to flow together into one long, stupid babble.  “—kicked out of the church declared a blasphemer and unfunny without trial, is the worst that could happen I’m sorry.  Fuck.  I’m sorry.”

There’s silence.  You cover your face with one hand and wait to die.  If he ain’t up for it, humiliation is all lined up to get its motherfucking kicks in, you are so dead.  You are  _so dead._

“…what you’re saying,” he says, and his voice is sharp quiet and and terrible.  “…is you got yourself feeling a mating fondness for the  _grand fucking highblood_  of the  _holiest motherfucking church_.”

That is what you said, and there’s no standing on those words again now.  All out in the open now, all soft spots on display and why did you have to think about it like that, like he’s looking at where you’re vulnerable with intent to hurt,  _nnnhh_ …

You sort of shuffle your legs and concentrate on keeping your bulge in and not doing anything too conspicuous. 

“Yeah,” you say, “…sure is a thing what motherfuckin’ happened.”  You fidget a bit.  “…and…been happenin’ for a sweep…or two…”

He breathes out hard and slow through his nose, rubs a hand at his temple like your educaterrorists do when you give them pan-ache. 

“Well,” he says, finally.  “…fuckin’ sucks for you then.”

Your guts tie in a knot.

“That’s it then,” you say, half pleading, half tight with frustration.  “That’s it.  Ain’t a thing to say after that, huh?  Haven’t got the slightest hint of a feeling in return?”

He tightens his mouth up..  You don’t give a fuck.  “You all coming up to my fucking grubscars,” he says, a little sharper this time.  “You, all lived as long as it takes me to wipe the blood off my fronds?  You’re barely a fuckin’ pupa, brat!” (fuck if that doesn’t make you mad, fuck if you ain’t shaking now, not from upset but from sudden  _rage_ )  “How many sweeps are you even, you’re nine, ten?”

“ _Eleven,_ you asshole!  That ain’t even funny, don’t you even  _joke_  with me!!”

He puts up his hands, all dramatic-like and impressed.  “--Oh well fuckin’ A, he’s  _eleven whole sweeps_ ,” he says, and you snarl at him.  “Better get naked already then, come on let’s go, where’s my imperial pail.”

“Behind your throne,” you say immediately, and he glares at you.  “I’m allowed to look ain’t I?   _Got eyes_ , don’t I?  You just keep it out there and don’t ever use it for nothing but painting out of!”

“And you think you’re its new use?  Hark at the arrogance of the brat, now!”

“I don’t  _need_ —Quadrants ain’t what I want from you, if you’ve got none you’ll give me, I don’t give a  _fuck_  what comes out of me or where it goes I just can’t up and be  _dealing_  with this anymore!”

He scoffs.  “—you telling me you’d be satisfied,  _all your wanting dealt with_ , for me to fuck you and leave it alone.  FORGIVE IF I DON’T MOTHERFUCKING BUY IT.”

“Satisfied—‘s a strong word,” you have to admit--what if you ask too much of him, what if he thinks it too much to give?  God, if you got this close and he sent you away you think you’d up and fucking expire.  “But.  I just…”

You stop, all lost, and he looks at you and softens just a touch. 

“Little one,” he calls you, and puts a hand on your head.  He’s gentle with you and you want him to hold you closer and bend and twist you into new ways, claw your flesh with his big hands until there are white-hot stars of pain behind your eyes and you can see the gods.  You’re glad for your sleeping clothes and the loose dark of your pants—your bulge seeks and twists and finds nothing but your very own flesh.  You can’t reach down to fix it, right at this moment, and you keep your face as hard and still as you can when your body  fucks itself and shakes and tries to moan.  “I’m old to you like stars and suns.  How do you figure I can bring good conscience to reconcile with  _using your motherfucking flesh_?”

“I don’t motherfucking  _care_!”

He frowns.  “—twitch of my hand could fucking  _break_ him and he tells me  _I don’t care_ ,” he mutters, and straightens up, pacing away from you, hands tight and loose and tight again by his sides.  Doesn’t look angry, quite.  You can’t even begin to guess whether you’ve got a chance or not.  “The wriggler thinks he’s stronger than that.   _The wriggler thinks he’s fucking invincible._ ”

“I know you’re a badass motherfucker, okay,” you snap at him—and where does he get off, making this about you all young and stupid and weak?  How does he even contemplate?!  “—you broke my frond today, I  _broke_ , I  _know_ , and I hurt so good the whole time they set it I swear on every Messiah, why do you think you caught me pailing myself stupid afterwards--?!”

“DON’T YOU FUCKING MOCK ME,” he bellows at you, and you cringe and bristle up and lash inside yourself with want all and together.  “AND DON’T YOU FUCKING LIE TO MY VERY FUCKING FACE!”

“Draw my blood again and you’ll be  _damn sure_  it’s not a lie!”

“Draw your blood?”  He growls at you, and his eyes are starting to go red around the edges, his teeth are all bare and white and you’re on  _fire_.  “ _I’ll chain you spread on an altar stone and CUT YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT_!”

And you.  You, stupid and hopeless and blasphemous as you are.  You see that image painted out in front of your eyes like glory itself, and you  _moan._

He stops.  You stop.

You can see his eyes flicking over you, up and down, feel him rethinking you and judging you and making his questions new about you, and you swallow hard and try not to fall down and beg. 

“ _That’d be_ ,” you say, shaky as a sinner in confessionihilation and so quiet you can barely hear yourself over his breathing.  “ _…that’d be.  The best miracle I ever had part of_.”

He takes a breath, and his is shaky too, just barely enough to hear.  “You ain’t lyin’ to me.”

“Messiahs strike me down,” you say, and you mean every word, it’s half a moan.  “…if I motherfucking lie.”

He steps in and takes your face in one big hand, turning it up toward him.  Starts to sink his claws in, and the slow, keening spread of the pain through your skin is like a bolt of white light in your mind, opening you up to something above you and making you just that little bit more whole.  Your eyes roll up and back in your head and every part of you goes limp from the feeling, spreading all through you. 

You whine when it stops, and he’s watching you, judging you.

“Can give me more than that,” you tell him, breathless.  “—hurt me so good, brother, so good and sweet, I wouldn’t ever stop you, there’s not a pain I’ve ever felt I’d say no to—”

“…I’d find one,” he says, grim and quiet and half to himself—hundreds,  _hundreds_  of sweeps of holy inquisition, interrogation, conversion of heretics most final and fatal—he knows more ways to hurt a troll than anyone in the galaxy.  You lean into his claws on your face, this little tiniest of sacraments, and close your eyes.  The light playing on them is all colors and you just make a tiny, whimpering sound and lean into him, you want him  _so fucking bad—_

He doesn’t give you a single word of warning, just slides a hand in between your legs so fast and unstoppable you just about quit breathing.  Your whole body  _shudders._   It’s just the knowledge that he’s looking at your face, that you have something to prove here, that keeps you from whining and doubling over around his hand.  “Ahh _hhhh_ —!” you say, and then groan, part because of the pleasure that’s running up and down you like lightning and more because that shit is a fucking embarrassment.  You were in trouble, you were denied, and now his hand is under you, almost lifting you, and your pan scrambles to keep up in your shock.  “—ah— _fuck—_ oh god, is—are you—?”

He just watches you, and hell, if he’s not going to say a word you’re taking this as what it is.  You find your footing, get your balance, and grind down on his hand hard enough to send pain shooting all up and through you from your trapped bulge.  His fingers twitch under you, and you chirp and grab at his arm with both hands, even your broke one, like if he decides to pull away again you could ever have a chance at stopping him. 

“ _Motherfucking eager_ ,” he grumbles, but he’s watching you with hungry, bright eyes now, considering it, and just the thought that you might finally get what you’ve wanted from him for so long makes you groan again.  “What’s this here?” You know it ain’t a question even when his fingers are moving so slow and you’re giddy with laughter and it feels so good—he’s watching you with a smile almost cruel, pretend-innocent.  His voice is all quiet, musing, soft.  “…what’s this little motherfucking wriggler think he’s doing to himself, in the chambers of his mother— _fucking—BETTERS?_ ” 

He squeezes, just a touch for his huge hands, so his palm is sudden and heavy on your bulge and his fingers press it into your nook and you  _lose it_ , arch your back and rut on his hand and chirr.  His other hand grabs your hips, keeps you still, and his hand between your legs keeps grinding too slow, brutal-hard, on the edge of fiery pain. 

You want to press down harder, make it hurt.  Pain fills you with frenzy—below that threshold, you squirm and writhe and pleasure wrecks you to the uttermost.  It  _destroys_ you.  Pain is a friend, fills you with an urgent, empty,  _wanting_  ache, but feeling good…it scares you to bits.

“You’re making a fucking disgrace of yourself,” he tells you, almost gentle-like, and you get words together to go  _yeah yeah yes please—_  “Hurt yet?  Want me to  _stop_?”

That is the worst fucking idea anybody has ever got into their rotted worm-eaten shit-hive of a pan, and you try to tell him so but it just comes out a whine and  _“No no no no no more please more waited so fucking long please more—_ ”

“…god, you’re a piece of work,” he says, really quiet, and then he pulls his hand away from your bulge, ignoring how that makes you scream, grabs your horn to bare the side of your neck, and _bites_.

You come back to your body crumpled at his feet, shaking and jerking all over with slurry dripping down your legs and tears of pain in your eyes, and he steps back from you and just stares, watching.

“ _Ahh_ ,” you tell him, shaky little disbelieving grub-sound, and then your head snaps back as he licks his lips, watching you, and everything  _throbs._   “—oh— _fuck_ …”  Your neck is bleeding.  You smear your clumsy fingers through the blood where his fangs sank into your skin like it was nothing, stare at the smudges of purple on your trembling fingertips, and then slide them into your mouth and whimper at the taste of blood and sea-salt.

\--

Your name is Kurloz Makara and

Well

Fuck.  
  
\--

He settles down in front of you, bends his mighty knee and comes down to where you are.  His hand takes your horn and tilts you up to look at him.

“…Messiahs are laughing in the heavens at me,” he tells you, and he leans down, so strangely awkward, to press his lips up against yours.  Your breath stutters in your aerations sponges.  Your whole body goes tight with a weird, sweet thrill.  What he just did to you, it was cruel and harsh and he gloried in that, you saw it in him, but that kiss wasn’t anything but purest flush, as gentle as taking care of any of your church brothers and sisters.  That change, cruel to gentle—it makes you shake.  He runs his fingers through your hair and it makes you keen, it’s so sweet.

“—please,” you’re saying, before you can even  find a meaning to what you’re saying, “—please no, don’t—”

He cocks his head to one side at you and does it again, gentle around the bases of your horns, and you take a harsh gasp of air in and shake.

“… _this scare you_?”  He asks, quiet, and keeps going, until you’re halfway to hands and knees, trembling and paralyzed.  “…not how I could break you apart with two fingers, not all the pain I could do to you, it’s  _this…_ ” he rubs at one horn, and your muscles go hot and liquid and weak.  “…because you know what to do with hurt, don’t you?”

All you can do is gasp, undone, and he chuckles down low in his chest.  He pulls you forward, leaning his back up against the arm of his throne, easing you onto his lap to look at you.  You’re sticky and clammy and nasty, but he doesn’t seem to care.

“There,” he tells you, and keeps teasing you with that  _softness_  until you’re panting into his shoulder, until your whole body is singing with it, your hips rolling up against him in tight little shivers, and he talks in your ear the whole time.  “ _…gets right up under everything you do to keep a hold of yourself, doesn’t it, feeling so good?  If it’s pain you go somewhere else but you ain’t hiding from me, boy, I’ll find out the very_ heart _of you, I’ll gentle it out of you and I’ll watch you all fallin’ apart in my claws…and you_ will _come apart, little one, you’ll fall to bits for me—”_

“Please,” you gasp, and you don’t have the slightest clue what you’re pleading for, a respite or a touch or to be left alone and never touched like this again, this terrible gentleness.  “ _Please—_ ”

“ _Been wanting this a while, haven’t you,_ ” he says, really soft, and then he pulls you back up against him and kisses you again, swallows the _yes—!_  That you try to answer to him. His mouth still tastes like your blood.  It’s cool there, in his arms, he could break your back like snapping a twig and you are fucking giddy that this is happening, that this is real.  You’re purring so loud it echoes. 

You sit there for a good while—it’s the middle of the day, who’s going to disturb you?  Still an ache in you, a slick thrill of pleasure from his gentling and his voice in your ear,  but you’re content, more than content, to lay against him and purr till the end of the world.  He smells like you, but older.  He feels like you, but stronger.  Everything is bright and hazy and motherfucking— _perfect._

“…so what is this, wriggler?”

You jump a little.  He’s got his head leaned back, his eyes shut, contemplating.  You pull your legs up to your chest (ew, sticky) and press your face into his neck.

“… _dunno_.”

“Not black.”

“Fuck no.”  You know that much, anyway.  Maybe you won’t ever have a pitchmate.  Not unless you find one who’ll refuse you pain instead of giving it. 

“Not pale.”  He breathes a little, then says, almost to himself, almost singing, or slamming, almost  _something_ —“… _not pale when I want to unstring your bones off your body, little weak one, fill half your pail slurry and half your pail blood…_ ”

Your whole body seizes up all over for a second, just at the thought, and you groan into his neck as he chuckles. 

“You’d let me.”

“I’d motherfucking  _beg_  you.”

“Even to your death?”  He sounds displeased at the thought, so you make a mild, un-committing noise.  You don’t want to die.  Shit’s scary.  But what you  _do_  want done to you goes beyond what you could survive, and you don’t know you’d tell him to stop, if he wanted to do you over for good and all.  He grumbles.  “…you need a goddamn palemate.”

“Fuck quadrants—” you start, and he nudges knee up between your thighs—your mouth snaps shut around a whine.  Is he going to be punishing you like this now, gentle and warm and sweet?  God, you don’t know whether you hope so or not. 

“You ain’t pulling that bullshit on this,” he growls at you.  “I can take you to pieces every single time, I could be all you ever fucking want, but that shit will fuck you up worse than sopor.  You need other quadrants.  And I’ll take care of your scrawny ass in flush, like the pan-dead old corpse I am.”

Oh god.  Oh god, oh god, oh motherfucking messiahs, fuck fuck fuck—

“What the fuck,” he says, and he takes you by one horn again, pulls your face up.  You are all shaking, all tremor and breathless.  “…are you  _crying_?”

You are.  You’re sniffling and hiccupping like you haven’t since your dad died, and the longer he looks at you and you look at him, the more you can’t fucking believe what he just said, what he just did, what he’s letting you be to him, oh god oh god oh god—

You bump your head into his neck and  _bawl._

“Great holy mirth,” he sighs, and pats you roughly on the ass.  “The fuck am I doing this for, wriggler?  Eleven sweeps.  God.”  But he doesn’t loosen his hold on you.   Just lets you break down like a wriggler having a tantrum, sobbing into his shoulder.

He lets you cry out, for all the time that takes, before he says a word again.  "You got class tomorrow," he says, when all those weird, happy sad shit has finally died out of you, and you groan and slump on him.  “Gotta get your schoolfeeding on,” he pokes at you and stands up.  You go limp, holding on like you used to when you tried to keep your dad from going, but he just lifts you up so you have to lock your legs around him instead.  He’s fucking  _big_ , you knew it when you looked up at him from the ground but it wasn’t fully in your pan until just now, looking down from where he is.  He laughs at the yelp you make when he pretends like he’s gonna drop you, and he trails his hands up your sides and pinches your grubscars under your shirt.  You got no choice but to hold on to him and swear, twitching and shivering.  “Hehehe, you squeak like a grub.”

“Oh, fuckin’—!  Shut.  Shut up.  Just.” You yawn so big your jaw-hinge cracks, and he laughs at you and then whaps you on the back of the head.

“Just so you know,” he says, like he’s pointing out a sloppy move at one-on-one training, “…if you show me a  single hint of disrespect in front of any other troll I’m gonna tie you to the side of the ship and take you through atmosphere.”

“Yessir,” you say, but you’re grinning again, all watery and wobbly, and he pinches your sides again to make you yelp and then lets you slide down him to the ground.  Shit, your pants are all nasty and clammy. 

“Back to your ‘coon now,” he orders you, and then, when you hesitate, he rolls his eyes at you and stands up, leading the way out into the silence of the ship.  “Fuckin’ wriggler.”

“… _cave-robber_ ,” you mumble, and you know he hears you because he swats you on the horns. 

You walk kind of silent back to your block, and nobody is out to see you—or if they are, they don’t get close enough to stop you.  The Grand Highblood walks where he will on his own motherfucking ship, and nobody is stupid enough to try to stop him, not even to comment on the skinny little leaky-panned trainee running alongside, two long strides to his ever step.  When you reach the door, he stops, and you stop too.  Everything is kind of numb and warm inside you—but aching too, a nasty sort of hollowness right inside you.   _That was nice_ , it tells you,  _that was sweet and cruel and what you wanted_

_Now say goodbye and forget._

“I’ll see you in, like…I’ll be in schoolfeeding tomorrow,” you say, for something to say, and give him a really shitty smile.  “…tell you when it starts to hurt next time you want to use me to show something, if you’ll let me do it again, I mean—”

“Yeah sure,” he cuts you off, and he puts a hand on top of your head, looks you right in the face.  “Next time,” he tells you, “…we gotta talk about some shit.  Like what you do if I find that pain you don’t want.  You picked a really fucking busy troll, I ain’t hardly ever around, but whenever next time happens—what?”

You try to make words and nothing comes out. 

“N—” you start.  “I—n-next time?”

He glares down at you.  With the lights shining behind him he looks like a servant of gods, he’s every inch a destroyer. 

“I didn’t say fucktoy,” he says, voice like the ocean, voice you could drown in.  “…I didn’t say one-day-stand.  I said  _flushed_ , Gamzee motherfucking Makara.  You take me at my word.”  And then he cracks half a smile at you.  “…you telling me you’d be satisfied,  _all your wanting dealt with_ ,” he asks you, an echo of what he threw at you before, lower and softer. “…for me to fuck you and leave it alone?  Forgive if I don’t motherfucking buy it.”

You smile at him so big it hurts, and wider, and have nothing— _nothing—_ you can say.  He grins back, a slash of big, white teeth in the dark, ducks down and kisses you once, and then shoves you, ever so gentle, back into your dark block, and closes the door behind you.


	2. Church is Blood, Blood has Duty

It becomes an on and off thing, you and your little most precious of brothers.  He would obviously rather it be more, but you ain’t just so young anymore that you can lie around with him all day.  He’s got schoolfeeding, coming up on a culling exam.  You’ve got to  _organize_  a culling exam, which means hundreds of lowbloods come from all over to be brought up and signed for and their deaths to be recorded and you gotta get a few of the older faithful exempt from missions to help guard all exits and on and on and on.

You snatch moments, when nobody’s looking—and even when they are, you get briefer ones.  You have been well-known to give a strong swat at a trainee who isn’t doing quite as they should, and everybody remembers how you took it when it came to light where skinny little Gamzee Makara was putting his sopor slime.  They all figure he’s just in your bad books.  He glances up at you with dark eyes in his white-painted face and chews on his lip and you grin at him like you want to eat him up.  
  
You do, really.  You want him far, far more than you credited you would.  When you interrogate, it’s for the messiahs and your pleasure don’t come into it—but hurting him…you’ve got no duty to fulfill.  You’ve got nothing you need to learn or prove, except to learn for yourself, over and over again, that every inch of him is made to be hurt in every way you could ever dream or desire.  You tell him how he can bring you to stop, if he needs you to, if it becomes too much, but he never uses the escapes you give him.  He lets you bruise him and burn him, cut him and push him,  _push_  him so hard, and he takes it all and cries out in thanks to you, to your gods and messiahs.   
  
You hold him afterwards and he purrs and croons and moves against you.  Notices, after the second or third time, that it hasn’t been your habit to get yourself off after him, and after he asks and asks ( _begs and begs, you can’t ever tell him no like that_ ) you teach him what feels best to you.  His face the first time he sees your bulge is a beautiful and a hilarious thing, and you laugh and laugh and laugh.   
  
(your name is Gamzee Makara and holy fucking shit you’re going to be imagining that inside you for sweeps, holy  _shit_ )  
  
He makes full cadet laughsassin.  You get him drunk as globes and then grind him up against the back of your own throne with his legs around your waist until he’s sobbing, until his claws leave gouges in his desperation.  He crushes his brothers and sisters in every fight, peerless, growing every day faster and stronger.  You put rings in his ears for him, studs through his horns in gold, with your shared symbol on them in the color of your blood.  Half a sweep passes, and the soft insides of his thighs you litter with the scars of your teeth, you use every tiniest failure for excuses to tie him naked over your lap and hit him until his back and his ass are a mass of bruises, until he’s keening with every breath.  And never once.  _Never_.  Does he tell you to stop.   
  
The empress notices…something.  You don’t know what and honestly you don’t really care, but she wiggles her eyebrows at you and makes fish puns about making catches and netting lucky and some shit, you’re not really listening.  You tweak her fins and she glubs and hits you and calls you a ‘godclammed bitch-ass raydist’ and threatens to spear you with her trident until you drop your paperwork on her head and abscond, laughing your ass off.   
  
And then one day you turn over a paper and see his face.   _Gamzee Makara_ , it reads, and you indulge in a moment of warm and purposeless affection before you sigh and go back to actually reading the print next to his picture.  It always starts with his stats, like you don’t know how tall and how old and when…  
  
…when…  
  
…well fuck you sideways.  The little brat’s got a wriggling day coming up.  
  
There has to be something you can do about that.  You turn your paper over, put your feet up on your desk, and start to plan.  
  
\--  
  
Your name is Gamzee Makara and you didn’t actually have any idea your wriggling day was coming up.  Or that it fell on a galactic church holiday, either, although you were plenty aware of the holiday’s existence.  You got no schoolfeeding that night, it’s all faygo and stardust and blood and horns.  You get buzzed and dizzy and stagger around slurring at people about how you’ve understood the secrets of the gods until the old man scoops you up, drops you on a couch and tells you, “ _Sit the fuck down and stop embarrassing yourself, Makara_ ,” and you giggle and kiss the palm of his hand.  He drags his claws over your skin, a split second of sting through your dull fog, and then whaps you on the head and vanishes off in the crowd again. You're pretty motherfucking distressed of that for a few minutes after; he hasn't hardly even touched you for more than a week, and that lack is a hundred times worse than you would have ever even thought it would be. But you're giggly and sleepy and dumb and you forget about it pretty soon after, because who's going to sulk when some saint got totally slaughtered on this day hundreds of sweeps ago? Not fucking you, is who.  
  
You stagger back to your block hours later, still wobbling, just drunk enough you can remember what it felt like to be soft, stupid, every thought a drifting, endless star system, walk through your door—  
  
“… _hello, Gamzee._ ”  
  
You just about piss yourself.  It’s a credit to your training that you spin around and immediately pull your clubs, but then a big figure looms up out of the corner of your room and you drop them again and smile.  
  
“Hey,” you say back, stupid and sweet, and he loops an arm around you, pulls you up and gets his mouth on your neck without so much as a good morning.  Not that you’re complaining.  Whatever that is that you were drinking, it’s got your skin prickly and hot and sensitive, and when his tongue flicks over your neck you hold on to him and squeak.  Everything is dizzy and spinning and oops, how’d that happen, your shirt went somewhere, wow, miracles…  
  
And then he pulls away and lets you down.  You got no way to get back up to his mouth except craning up at him and pulling at him like a wriggler, so you just kind of whine and make yourself all miserable-looking all over.   
  
“Happy Wriggling Day,” he tells you, and you jump a little.   
  
“It’s my wriggling day?”  
  
He looks at you for a long second, and then he leans down and kisses you again, right on the top of your head.  
  
“You’re a wreck,” he tells you, not a condemnation but strange and gentle.  And then his fangs glint white in a smile.  “…gonna give you something  _special_.”  He pulls himself up straight, and all of a sudden he’s the warlord, the highblood, the holy lord of the church of the mirthful messiahs. His voice is a growl like bones grinding.  “… _follow me_.”  
  
You’re already pretty tired, but when he uses that tone of voice on you being tired stops mattering in the slightest.  You look around and reach for your shirt—  
  
“ _No_ ,” he snaps, a shockwave, a slap, and you bring your hands back with a shudder.  “You won’t fuckin’ need it.  Close your eyes.”  
  
"But—”  
  
He hits you.  Not hard enough to hurt, not really—just hard enough to rattle you right up to your horns.  You shut your trap, and shut your eyes.  He takes you by the horn in one big, tight hand, and pulls you off into the dark.  
  
You keep track of where you are for a few turns, but then he takes a turn you don’t recognize and you lose track.  Left and straight and straight and straight and left and right and straight some more, and then through a door, and you stop.  Your footsteps don’t echo off the walls; wherever you are, it feels small, and the walls give back only dull murmurs of the noises you back. He spins you around and your back hits cold metal, a shock to your bare skin.  You almost try to look around, but you’re under orders and they haven’t been taken from you yet, so you just breathe and don’t— _don’t_  open your eyes.  
  
“Back against the wall,” he orders you, a low, deadly growl, and you can’t follow orders fast enough.  “Arms up.”  You raise them up—he snarls.  “ _Higher_.”  He takes your wrists and slams them against the wall, spread high above your head so you almost have to stand up on your toes to reach.  You stay where you’re put, keep your eyes shut like he ordered you, and then something wraps tight and sure around your wrist.  (Oh fuck, yes,  _fuck_ yes)  One wrist, then the other—then your elbows, then your stomach, and you couldn’t fight if you wanted to as he kicks your legs spread and straps them still as well.  
  
You shake, and he chuckles.  
  
“Open your eyes.”  
  
The first thing you see is his face, and it quiets you a little just seeing him and knowing he’s there.  You look around you, kind of bleary still; you’re in a little room, plainer than the rest of the ship you’ve seen.  The straps around you, holding you helpless and pinned against the wall, are plain and black and strong, and they smell like blood.  Behind him, the wall is a single broad rack of little hooks, and… _things_  dangle off of them, little metal and leather tools you can’t quite make out the shape or use of.   
  
You’re tied up where they torture the heretics, where they force them to accept the Messiahs before they’re taken to slow pieces.  You ain’t even _allowed_ to know where this place is on the ship or know what holy agenda he works here, it’s a place made only for pain and by the way he watches you you know he knows that you know where you are and what’s done here.  Your bulge throbs and your whole body shudders.  
  
“Got some lessons to teach you,” he croons, and drags at your lip with one claw, baring your teeth, your hungry, panting mouth.  “Quite the little  _sinner_ , aren’t you?”   
 _  
Sinner_.  It’s not what you were expecting, not what you ever expected to hear from his mouth and it smacks you in the gut and burns there, fury and heat and strange, hungry shame.  He digs his claws into your cheek and tips your head up to face him.  You didn’t realize you’d bowed it—your face is so hot.   
  
“ _Aren’t.  You._ ”  
  
“No,” you growl, sharp and defensive on a reflex, and he grins like you’ve answered a question right for him in class.  Does he want you to fight him?   
  
And then it hits you.  
  
…he does.  He  _does_  want you to fight him.  He wants you to be the heretic, the sinner.  Make him force you.   
  
It’s all you can do not to do the exact opposite and call out thanks to the messiahs for giving you someone who wants to do _exactly_ what you want.  
  
“Got a powerful job of teaching to do on you,” he murmurs, and he trails his claws down from your face to your neck to your chest to your stomach, teasing little sparks of touch down your hips that make you twitch out of your control.  “ _Who made you?_ ”  
  
You learned this, you know what to say, but the words keep dancing out of reach when you try to find them—his claws have a hold of you, every bit of you, even though he’s barely touching you.  “I,” you say like an idiot, “I—mother grub.”   
  
He back-hands you.  You’re still gasping, rattled all over, when his hand goes back to your stomach, and you reel between the sting in your cheek and the little thrills of heat through you from where he touches you.   
  
“You were made by your messiahs,” he tells you, almost gentle, and you just want him to dig in his claws already but you can’t even make your knees stay strong, let alone make your mouth move to try to ask for it.  “Spat out of the shitholes of the dark carnival, you.”  He takes your horns in two big hands and tilts your head back.  You don’t see what he does, but it ties them to the wall behind your head, forces your head to tilt back and turns your face up to him.  Your throat is bare to him, and he has you wide open.  Your nook is a constant, empty throb.  You arch up and whine—your bulge slips into you again, such a familiar aching thrill.   
  
“Who made you?”  
  
“The— _oh_ —” he’s got his claws resting over your pulse, digging in when you swallow and try to wet your mouth.  “Ah—I-I—”  
  
Another slap.  Your head rings.   
  
“Haven’t learned it yet,” he says, disappointed, and he turns his back on you and reaches back at the racks of little, shining things all lined up in the shadows across from you.  You can’t see what he’s reaching for, and all of you is shaking, all of you is burning. He hasn’t hardly done anything to you yet but he’s holding on to your pusher in one big, cold, rough hand and you can’t breathe, just wait on what he does to you next.  “ _Look at this.  This filthy little_ heretic _letting his bulge distract him from things he should be motherfucking_ begging _to learn…_ ”  
  
“ _Fuck_ —” Your legs shake but you can’t pull them closer together, can’t get any pressure on your nook, can’t hardly even move, and you want him to just— _touch_  you already.  The frustration is a tight, hot boil in the pit of your guts.  “I’ll—I’m not—”  
  
He turns back to you and in one hand he sets down something metal, something you can’t quite see—you try to turn your head and look and whatever he put on your horns draws tight before you turn more than a tiny bit.  He notices you looking though; he smiles to himself and picks up the other thing he took from the rack.  It’s a long strip of cloth, your blood color (his blood color), and you have just enough time to whine before he reaches around you ( _the smell of him, the_ smell _of him, his pleasure watching you is on a long, slow boil, all around in the air_ ) and ties a knot behind your head.  The whole world is dark and cool and the feel of him moving just a hand’s breadth in front of you.   
  
“ _Quite the filthy little sinner_ ,” he murmurs in your ear, and presses his lips against yours for just a second.  His skin is dry and even living in the sky, sailing through stars for a hundred sweeps, he still tastes of sweet sea-salt.  “ _…aren’t you_?”  
  
And then he sinks his teeth into one of your ears so hard he goes right through.  The pain is sudden and sharp and explosive and you thrash around and swear like a motherfucker until he lets go, pulls away and slaps you again.  Your ear throbs, right down your spine and between your legs; the slap rattles your bones.  You’re left panting hard and fast, swallowing on your dry throat, shaking and needing, _needing.  
_  
“Aren’t you?!”  
  
Fuck,  _fuck_.  This isn’t a single thing like what you’ve felt before—these bonds aren’t just made for his convenience to hold you on a whim, they’re well and truly fixed, they’re to hold the strongest and the most desperate and you can’t hardly shift in them.  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” you gasp this time, and he makes a noise you can’t parse out, you can’t see his face, the pain is hot in you and you need more of it like you need air.  What’s he look like?  You can’t see his face, what he’s doing as he shifts in front of you.  “Yes—fuck—yeah, sure, god—”  
  
“What are you?” he prompts you, and your pusher redoubles, pounds in your throat.   
  
And you realize that there is a lesson here, beyond your satisfaction, beyond this…this  _game_  he wants to play with you.  When did you decide you were so perfect, so holy, you couldn’t admit you were a sinner?  You’re still a troll, you’re still bound up in dirty flesh, when did you get the unmitigated motherfucking  _pride_  to choke on that?  
  
“ _A sinner_ ,” you choke out, and he laughs deep in his throat and reaches for the other thing he brought over, a little clatter of metal on the edge of your hearing.  You’re a sinner.  Unworthy of your gods, unworthy of him, for all you already knew that saying it is still like cutting out a rot.  The pain is whole and entire and right inside of you.  More right than you have been in a long, long time.  “—motherfuckin’—I’m all—inside, like, I’m fucked up, cut the rot—” you’re making no sense, babbling scripture at random, “—bring wicked noise all spilling in mirth and, and, and, fucking—the blood and bone, the holiest heart of—oh god—”  
  
“There,” he tells you, and he puts a hand on your head as something colder even than your royal blood touches your skin right at the base of your throat.  “…don’t worry, little sinner,” he says in your ear, and the blunt tip of the tool he’s pressing to you hums softly, a soft, rising whine of gaining power, building under his voice.  “ _We’ll cut it out of you._ ”  
  
Something goes right through you,  _CRACK_ , and your thinkpan goes white.  Pain is everything, pain is your very motherfucking  _existence_  and your fucked-up pan sinks it all in and screams and begs  _more yes fuck oh yes again MORE_ …  
  
He lets you come back down from that one, lets your screams die for whimpers, your bulge stop thrashing inside of you, and then he moves the thing he’s holding down, presses it in the soft skin under the edge of your thoracic struts.  It digs into the hollow where the bony ridges change to skinny muscle, and you shiver, still panting.  The thing is charging again with a harsh, soft little whine that goes right down to your pusher and makes your whole body shiver.   
  
“… _we’ll burn off your sin_.”  
 _  
CRACK_  and you’re gone again, flying, sobbing, writhing.  You can’t take another one of those, you  _can’t_ , something will give way and you’ll break,  _so good_ —  
  
He touches it to your belly, just inches above the throbbing, aching core of you, and you whimper and moan things that don’t even make sense,  _please please please so good PLEASE_ and  _motherfuck, fuck oh god fuck_  and some part of you  _no no please no I can’t you can’t don’t make me please I’ll do anything_ and the rest of you  _please yes please wanna be good, holy for you, for them, do it,_ do it _—!  
_  
“… _we’ll make you_ better _,”_ he tells you.  
  
CRACK  
  
When you drop back into your body you’re gasping, crying out, and pain and pleasure are shooting up and down you so close together you can’t tell what’s even what.  You’re dripping your own slurry, and he’s made you come harder than you ever have in your entire fucking life without a single touch of his hands on your skin.   
  
You go limp, when but the bonds are still there, made to take limp bodies, and he’s touching you all of a sudden, dragging his claws over your grubscars.  Every thing that never meant a thing when you touched yourself is suddenly clear and staggering and white hot as motherfucking words of fire when it’s his hands instead of yours, and you’re still shivering when he laughs again and puts the thing back down in a clatter of metal.  
  
I think we’re making good progress, little sinner,” he tells you, and pinches one grubscar sudden and hard.  You can’t hardly help the keen that comes out of you—your back arches as he twists without a hint of mercy and your bulge and nook twitch, throbbing from too-good, too-bright  _feeling._   “The church knows how to take care of a brother looking to get his repent on.”  He lets go and smooths a hand over the place he jolted you last, and you whine.  “…and not a drop of royal blood spilled.”  
  
“ _Nnnn_ ,” you try to ask, but you’re drooling and numb and dizzy, still twitching.  Felt like something stabbed right through you, turned you to ashes and brought you back, and you ain’t even bleeding?  You stop and think, and he’s right, the spots don’t feel a drop of motherfucking wet.  He ain’t broken your skin.  Only your ear still drips slow and steady on your shoulder.  
  
“Little one,” he calls you again, again and again, and strokes his claws over your cheeks, your jumping pulse, the spot at the bottom of your throat where he hurt you first.  “What you want from me, little motherfucker?  What’s a sinner want from the church of the holy messiahs?”  
  
It’s all you can do to whine.  
  
“Not an answer,” he reminds you, and his hands slide down and pluck at the waist of your pants.  The promise of more hits you like strong sopor used to, sends you dizzy and reeling.  “Preach words, little disciple of mine.   _Words_.”  
  
“ _Ffnngnh,_ ” you say instead of words, trying so hard but you can’t  _move_  right, your mouth is a hundred kinds of numb and dry.  He makes a little noise, fully motherfucking disappoint, and pulls away.  You hear him walk, and then something slapping and sloshing, wet against the metal sides of…a pail?  He’s standing in front of you with a full pail and you whine, motherfucking pathetic.   
  
“When I ask you a question,” he says, “…I expect  _answers._ ”   
  
And then wet and icy coldness splashes into you like a slap in the face.  You think it’s slurry for a second, and the shame hits you hard and hot under the chill—but there’s a splash of it cold in your mouth, and you know the clean, sweet taste a second later.  Icy water, cold enough even you find yourself shivering, shaking the weakness out of you.  You’re alive enough to thrash a little and take a big breath, gasping in air; pulled out of the weird, far-away place he all went and sent you with that last shock.  The water is sweet and cold and you’re dry—you lick at your own lips and chin and try to get every drop as falls from your soaked hair.  
  
He sees you try to lick the wet off; he chuckles, and his big, rough thumb traces your lip.   
  
“Thirsty?”  He purrs at you, and his wet claws slide past your fangs.  He makes a pleased noise when you suck the water off his fingers.   
  
“ _Yes_ ,” you get out when he takes them away again, and your voice is a croaky little noise.  “ _Mother—fuckin’—yeah._   Please.”  
  
He doesn’t answer, but his fingers come back, dripping fresh with blessed water and you take it off them again and again and again, put all the care into it you’ve ever put into your paint, your prayers.  Everything is bright in the darkness under the blindfold.  The mirthful messiahs have their hands on your shoulders and your bulge is moving again, restless little too-much twitches.   
  
He stops just a little before you’re satisfied, and he ignores when you whine.   
  
And then there’s a sharp little  _click_ , and a line of fire opens up from your waist all the way down to your knee.  You jump and yelp, and the air hits your soaked, stinging leg; he’s taken a knife to you, cutting away at what clothes you’ve still got on in fast little flicks of his knife.  He don’t stop till you’re bare in your entirety, shivering from the wet and the cold air, and then he stops and stands back, watching you.  You  _ache._    
  
You consider this is why he went and left you without for so long, so he could wreck you in your entirety with all the tools he has and with you so totally at his mercy, and it makes you chirp, little noise you didn’t even motherfucking know you could make.  He purrs back at you, one long, low hum of a noise, before you hear him go away again and hear the soft sounds of him as he makes his selections from the rack of tools behind him.   
  
“Now,” he says, when he comes back to you, and he steps up to you, puts a finger under your chin even though he’s got you tied so you can’t hardly look anywhere  _but_  to him.  “What do you want?”  
  
You don’t know, but some part of you seems to get it, because your mouth moves without you putting the words together on your own.   
  
“… _your bulge_ ,” you say, and it sounds all kinds of small and shy for all you’re strung up for him to torture, naked and dripping.  His hand on your face goes still.   
  
“…do you, now,” he says, softly, and you can’t get a single tell from him—whether he likes that, whether he’s angry.  “Size I am, little motherfucker?  I’d split you in half.”  
  
“ _Fuck_ ,” you say, half a moan, half frustration—is that meant to be a warning, when he says it like that down deep in his chest, when he _knows_  how visions like that take you, of your body wrecked and shattered?  “Yeah, fuck yeah—please?”  
  
He hums, and his hand is on you so sudden you choke; his finger traces around your nook, already hollowed out, twitching where you fucked yourself for him before.  He goes in with three fingers and no warning and you arch your back and wail, his fingers are so  _big_.  The stretch is enough to hurt, that burning, urgent hurt from a tight stretch in your nook that makes your whole body light up and tense.  
  
“…I don’t care what you want in this matter particular,” he says, slow and heavy as holy writ.  “…I ain’t here to break you in ways as can’t ever be fixed.  No.”  
  
He takes his fingers away.  You open your mouth to argue or whimper or beg him, and he grabs your chin again, holds it there open so you can’t start.  
  
“ _No_ ,” he says, final and utterly unamused, and you have to cringe a little.  “Do you motherfucking comprehend?  I don’t care what shit gets said for our mutual satisfaction when I take you for the day, wriggler.   _Gamzee_.”  When he uses your name it makes something snap tight inside—you make a little noise you can’t control, that control coming down hard on you and making you still and silent.  “…I don’t care what you want to play at being for me when I fuck you up.  Church is blood and blood has duty, and if I say you cannot take me you motherfucking _will not take me_ , do you understand?”  
  
“…yes,” you say, finally, and he grunts, satisfaction.  
  
“Good.”  He lets you go.  You’re released, not just from his hands—whatever attention he turned on you, held you there totally silent and leashed and brought to your knees, it goes as well.  You feel achey and stupid and mortal again, and the rebuke sits heavy on you and brings you low.  Your eyes prickle stupid and hot.  You hear him take a slow breath, in and out again, just watching you, and you small and stupid and not worth his smallest regard.   
  
“…not to say,” he says finally, really slow, almost gentle, “…we can’t get you there.”  
  
You lose track of how to breathe.  He presses the pad of a thumb where the very root of your bulge meets the topmost slit of your nook, and he rubs so  _gentle_  you could almost scream.  It feels so good you want to shake to pieces.  Everything that froze up and went away when he told you  _NO_  so sure and angry, all of that comes rushing back all at once; where you are, the things he’s said, the fog of sex and sweat in the air, swamping you.   
  
“Take some work,” he murmurs to you, and never stops, never lets up taking you to pieces with how good it feels, refusing you pain.  The pain takes you somewhere hard and fierce but like this you’re a wreck, your legs are already motherfucking shaky and weak as hell, your insides are coiling up hot.  “Gonna have to stretch you out nice and slow, but…” he takes your bulge in one big hand, gentle so  _gentle_ you’re making these quiet little noises over and over again,  _oh oh oh…  
_  
“… _I think maybe you’ll have to ask me again, some day,_ ” he whispers to you, and that makes you arch your back as far as you can and  _sob_.  You knew, with you tied up, he could hurt you.  Hell, you knew it and you welcomed it, but you didn’t think of the more terrible things he could do to you—that he could keep you here, just  _keep_  you here, and give you sweet, terrible pleasure until the coming of the end prophesied.   
  
He doesn’t keep you there that long but it feels like eternity, trapped motionless in the slowly-growing pleasure, every new surge feeling like too much, more than you can bear—he waits until you’re convulsing around his hand, sobbing, and then that’s when he reaches out and picks something up off his tray.  It  _hurts_ , you need to come so  _bad_ , but it’s not the right kind of pain to get you off.  It’s slow and almost as gentle as his hands on you and you can’t get that urgency from it, just an added misery of need.   
  
“Hush,” he tells you, and you understand what’s coming out of your very own mouth all of a sudden—your gasps and cries, you’re calling out to your gods, thanking them over and over again, begging for their mercy and his.  He’s got his fingers in your nook, spreading and slowly closing again, and the stretch is a sharp little sting of pain every time.  You’re dripping purple over the mess you already got on your own self before, begging him you’ll do anything,  _anything_ ,  _please—_  “ _Hush_.”  He takes a sharp pinch of the soft inside of your thigh between to claws and twists sudden and hard—you gasp yourself silent, frozen, motionless on the perfect ache of the pain.  He takes everything away but the fingers in your nook—you whine.  “ _Hush_ , little heretic.  Cease your noise, it’s a motherfuckin’ disgrace.”  Metal moving; something else from his endless selection of tools, something that feels thin and sharp like the end of a needle when it touches your skin.  He draws a thin little line, darting from your slicked lower lip down to your chin—  
  
A line of white-hot fire flares up, lip to chin like he’s split you down to the very  _bones_ , like he’s taken a blade to you, and you cry out in sudden shock as your whole body suddenly goes tight and awake and alive, all your dizzy fog burned right out of your pan.  He stops as soon as you make a sound and the noises you make are truly pathetic in all ways.  You die away finally, back into panting silence, and then that needle-tip touches you again, at your thorax this time.  He makes more little lines of fire, spiraling all across your chest and you make a sound—a tight little noise straight from your guts, your throbbing nook—he stops.  Only when you’ve fallen silent again does he begin again, this time on the side of your throat—you moan.  He stops.  
  
He plays with you for long enough you’ve got tears running down your face again, long enough your bulge is fucking you along with his fingers, he just leaves those burning, searing little lines across your skin.  Every noise you make, anything past rough panting and muffled-off whimpers through your teeth, he deprives you again and you hear him laugh as your noises grow more desperate, always more desperate, stretched taut and needy.  You feel like you’re going to fucking  _die_ , but you bite your tongue hard and keep yourself silent and gasping as he trails it down the soft spots of your stomach, and only when he takes it away again, this time for no reason you know, do you let out a single rough, tiny little sob and go limp.   
  
“ _Hail messiahs both,_ ” he murmurs into the still air between you, and winds your bulge around his finger and lets it go again.  Again.  Again. Waiting for you.  
  
“ _Their—_ ” you’ve said it enough times, your mouth can almost speak the words on its own, but you’re a mess of pointless longing and helpless sensation and you stammer and catch on the words.  “— _their works—their great—m-motherfucking joke in the—oh fuck,_ please, please, god  _please_ —!”  
  
He clicks his tongue at you and picks up where you left off.  “…in the culling pits of the worlds they left,” he rumbles, so close to your ear, the only thing you can feel or smell or hear, the only thing in the world— “…in the space in between…” something scrapes at your nook, the needle-point of the thing he’s been playing with; just the tease of it, whatever makes it burn isn’t turned on but you’re writhing, imagining how it would feel if he turned it on, right now, right this second--  
  
“ _Hail messiahs both,_ ” you pant, broken.  “ _Hail messiahs both—”  
_  
“ _Your penance is paid,_ ” he tells you, and he sinks his torture toy into your nook, sudden and vicious and hard and your world catches fire and you scream and thrash and white out.  
  
When you come back you can feel him wrapped around you, his cold arm on the wall between your head and your straining shoulder, he’s bent down so his breath ruffles through your wet hair.  There’s a soft, splashing sound beneath you as your body shakes you through the last and he pulls whatever he was fucking you with out of your stinging, throbbing nook—he put his pail under you.  You chirp and he echoes at you, lower and hoarse and soft.  “ _Yeah, there you go, motherfucking gorgeous, does that hurt_?  Talk to me.” You gasp something that almost makes words, “ _yes_ ” and  _“hurts_ ” and “ _please_ ” and  _“god_ ”, half prayer and half plea, and he groans soft and low in his chest and makes soft, slick sounds at the edge of your hearing.   
  
The noise he makes when he comes is soft and barely there, and it’s the most beautiful fucking thing you’ve ever heard.  You almost want him to start again, to make you go another round—but you’re so thirsty and you ache in a way that has more to do with exhaustion than any kind of pleasure, and there’s a not-fun kind of strain in your arms that tells you you’re not just causing yourself pain, you shouldn’t hang here too much longer.  He notices you twitching and shifting around; he kisses you on the mouth, really gentle, catches your lip in his fangs and then lets go and leans away.   
  
“ _You’re a credit to the motherfucking church_ ,” he tells you in your ear, and reaches up to untie you.  He starts with your horns—your head lolls forward on your weak, sore neck, and the pain is a pain of relief.  Then your arms—you can’t hardly make your hands move.  They’re not numb (you don’t want to numb a heretic in the middle of an interrogation) but you can’t get your fingers to do what you want.  Your shoulders’ throbbing joins the rest of it, an all-over ache like after a real good workout or a long, hard subjugglation.  
  
When he unties your legs they give out.  For a second, you’re free-falling, and you’re too wobbly and weak to try to even  _contemplate_ on catching yourself—but then a pair of big, cold arms come around you and holds you up.  You lean on him, all made out of pumping blood and seawater, and without those ties holding you up your boundaries have gone all dizzy and foggy and you can’t tell where you end and thin air starts. You purr.  
  
“There you go,” he says, and his voice is a hum in his thorax, you can feel it against your ear.  You’re not as small as you were, not nearly—you’re at least a head and a half taller than you were when you came on his ship so many sweeps ago—but he still hauls you up into his arms and holds you off the ground, gets your face in the crook of his neck.  “…there’s a good little brother, there you go…” and then, satisfied and amused and deep as oceans, “… _happy wriggling day_.”  
  
He doesn’t take the blindfold off when he carries you somewhere else in his arms—pours a long drink of cold water down your throat, slides you into a hot pool and goes away again.  That’s where you fall asleep, in the dark and the warm and the silence, and you dream you’re being taken to pieces, your body is peeling away and inside of you is something bright and sweet and gorgeous, something worthy of gods. 


	3. What's My Name?

You wake up because someone is humming.

The blindfold came off while you were dozed off (you slept without sopor and not a single motherfuckin’ nightmare did you have, ain’t that a trick?) and you blink at the dim light and then around at the room around you.  Lots of black.  Lots of color.  Lots of lights and lots of darkness.  And your ancestor, your matesprit, wandering around wiping blue-ish blood off of his hands with a rag and fanning out a folder full of papers.  His shoulders are strong under his shirt, and you lean on the edge of the hot pool-trap-thing he put you into and just watch him for a while. 

Everything aches, but it’s not too bad.  The warm from the water has seeped into your bones and joints and soothed your aches.  Didn’t quite reach the  _throb_  in your nook and your twinging bulge, but…you like having those around.  Nice reminder.   

You watch him and think. By the blood on his hands he must have been torturing a sinner—maybe more than one, he gets them in crowds sometimes, interrogates in groups so they can watch what’s coming and he doesn’t lose as much time—he’s been torturing in that same dark little room, in those same dark, strong buckles and straps.  He’s been taking trolls apart in that same place where he made you come twice, all of…what, hours ago? 

The thought combined with the memory make you shift a little and shudder, and everything aches down inside you in an overstretched, exhausted  _throb_.  It feels good, but every inch of you is just.  So tired.

“Fuckin’  _mutant_  shit,” he’s muttering to himself, and he scratches his wild hair, growling.  “… _smug-fuck shithead showy-ass color_ —” he slaps his papers down and then sighs and shoves them away.  Pulls out one of his huge, heavy, splattered clubs and a rag, and starts polishing.

You fall asleep again watching him.

When you wake up the second time, you’re being lifted.  Your blood and slurry and sweat and tears are soaked off of you, long gone, and you feel like a really waterlogged and really motherfucking satisfied piece of cotton candy, all fuzzy around the edges.  Or something.  Honestly you don’t really have too great a need to figure out what it is you feel like, exactly, because what you feel like first and foremost is Gamzee Makara, but happy as fuck and warm to your bones and clean and sore and pitied within an inch of your life.  You’re laid out on a towel and rolled up in it and carried off again. 

“ _Mmnnngh_ ,” you say, and huddle down into your towel.  Everything is so great.  You’re so great.  He’s so great.

“Hush up, wriggler,” he rejoins, but quiet and with no snap to it, and he pats you on the butt a little bit, as much as he can do with his hands all occupied holding you up.  “You slept a hell of a long time.”

“Mmm.” You nip at his shoulder—oops, kind of chew on it sloppily, well, that’s close enough and things keep on dancing around in front of you—and he grunts and swats your ass again. 

“Quit that, you’re in no fucking shape to do anything but  _go the hell to sleep_.”

“… _just slept_ ,” you mumble into his neck, but he growls and you’re not going to argue too much.  Every time he takes a stride you rock a little, it’s sending you right off again.  “… _so great.  Motherfucking._ Miraculous _.  Mm.”_

He sighs a little against your hair.  “It was good then,” he says, like there was ever a single doubt about that, and you make enthusiastic noises into his shoulder. 

“ _Best.  Wriggling day.  A brother ever had,_ ” you have to piece together word by word by word—it’s work, but it’s worth it for how that makes him relax a little bit against you.  You’re so lucky, you’re  _so_  motherfucking lucky.  “… _flushed for you_ ,” you tell him, and you kiss his throat again, all gentle and red as you know how.  He freezes for a half of a second, and then he huffs out another breath and kisses you back, right at the base of your horn where it makes you shiver. 

“Yeah,” he says.  “I know.  Me too.  Messiahs help me, me too.”

And then your eyes are dropping shut again and you drift far, far away, following the distant thunder of his pusher's beat into the dark.

\--

As it turns out it is a good thing that you snatched that time with Gamzee on his wriggling day, and an even better thing that it landed on a day where he wouldn’t be missed.  Because after that he comes into the final stretch of his training and he is busy as much or maybe even moreso as you.  He’s lucky enough he has a mind for scripture and verse, for understanding their meaning and committing them to mind; he doesn’t have to study those hardly at all as the other parts of his learning come down on his head like a shit-ton of rectangular building objects. 

You, by and large, let him get on with it.  Now you’re both on the same page as far as the subject of you fucking him properly some day, you get to him every couple of days or weeks and you give him a new toy, a little bigger.  He is unhappy at your speed in this endeavor particularly, you know, but it is equal parts a responsibility of yours (you do pain only when you mean to) a joy to torment him by going slowly (needs to learn to take it slow, he’s so young yet and he still wants to throw himself into everything  _so fucking fast_ ) and also particularly that the sister who’s been overseeing his sparring comes and sees you for a drink sometimes and you figure she is starting to get a little wise to the whole thing. 

Perhaps not to your hand in it, inconceivable and strange as it all seems that you found your descendant and right then four sweeps later you’re fucking him, but wise to the fact Gamzee is not entirely focused on his fights.  You’ve got to get down there some time and watch him spar.  Seeing him try to keep on top of things with his nook so full you would bet it is the  _funniest goddamn thing_ , and he does get distracted so. 

That is beside the point.  You keep out of his way, speaking over all.  As the older of your faithful start to take their tests there are younger coming in, fresh from the home-planet. You put the fear of god into them, welcome them on board and into the family, and then because it’s funny you pick out the ones who are glaring the hardest at each other and make them neighbors.  Fuck, if they want to get in fights, now is the time to do it, and this way you can whoop their asses early and get them all in line.  You’ll not be having any breaking of the church in your ship, no matter how small.  You put Gamzee in charge of the evening massacre for the newest of them, and watch their eyes catch fire when he preaches.

It is after one of those sermons where he’s screaming at the end, the congregation on its feet and the lights all set swaying from their thundering voices, that the door of your throne room comes open even though you haven’t sent for anybody, and Gamzee comes slinking in. 

He looks all drained the fuck out, his paint is kind of smeary at the corner of his mouth and he drags his feet sort of, like it’s been a long day.  But still he comes slouching up to your throne, throws himself down onto the ground by your feet, pulls his studying shit out of his sylladex, and just sprawls there.  You regard him with no small amount of amusement.

“What exactly the fuck,” you ask.

“I’m bored as  _hell_.”

“Studying ain’t meant to be fun, wriggler.  ‘S practice resisting mental torture for if you ever get grabbed by an enemy of the church.”

He looks back and up at you and rolls his eyes.

“It so ain’t.”

“You have my motherfuckin’ word.”

He grumbles, but goes back to scrolling around on his palmhusk.  You look down over his shoulder, and you groan a little bit too, on instinct—it’s an imperial culling form.  The bane of your existence. 

“…not those though,” you allow.  “Those need to get thrown into a sun.  All of ‘em.”

“Fuckin’ right. I got a head so full I swear to gods I’m going to explode.” He bonks his head back against your knee.  “…if I gotta look at one more form with that  _stupid_  fuckin’ symbol at the top, I’m gonna do some kinda…” he makes a gesture with his hands in the air.  “…gonna flip off the handle,” he finishes, a little lamely.  “I mean, the fish puns are pretty funny, right, but just.    _Fuck_.”

“Didn’t tell you serving the messiahs had so much fuckin’  _busywork_  attached, huh.”

He groans.  You grin and reach out for him, and he squeaks when your arm goes around him and pulls him up onto your lap.  He makes another noise, just that slightly different tenor, when his back presses up against you; he’s still mottled purple and red and black from three nights ago.  You should get him naked some time, just to see where the bruising is sticking around.  And find out if he has a print of your palm still bruised into his ass, because that would be hilarious and fucking  _hot_  in equal measure. 

“Oh come on,” he protests—although not with much force, you note, and wonder if he came here with the intent to give himself to you like this all along.  Wriggler has no persistence.  Wriggler hasn’t learned to be patient yet.  “I got an exam with Talloy, that old hard-ass hates my guts.”  He shifts around a little bit and then tenses up and gasps, and you remember you changed the size of the toy in his nook last time—he still catches his breath around it, little muscles twitching and fluttering all through him under your hands.   

You ain’t particularly in the mood, but he is young, and he is eager, and he is  _perpetually_  in the mood as you are learning.  And regardless of your own wanting, you don’t need to get off to enjoy how he shivers and shakes.  You set your hands under the lowest edge of his shirt and rub slow and easy at his stomach, and he shudders. 

“ _Go on and study then_ ,” you purr at him, and he makes a muffled little noise.  “… _ain’t stopping you._ ”

“Nngh, _”_ he protests, but he picks up his palmhusk with hands that shake a little and goes back to flipping through scripture.

By the time you work your hands up to the base of his thorax he’s read the same chapter six times, and you take satisfaction in the way he arches his back a little at every stroke of your fingers over his skin.  His thighs clench around one of yours and shake. 

“ _You suck at studying_ ,” you tell him, and he tries to growl.  It comes out a warped purr.  “Utterly shameful, wriggler.  I’m motherfucking disappoint.”

“ _Shut up_ ,” he grits out, and then cries out when you take a hold of a thigh in each hand and pull him down hard on your leg.  His hands fasten hard on your wrists, trying to pull himself down harder; you laugh and shake your head and tilt him against you until he lies with his head in the crook of your shoulder and his legs spread to fit around you.  He’s taller, bigger than he was, but he still has to kneel up in your lap on shaking legs to reach your throat and you hold on to his hips and rub the broad expanse of one palm gently over his bulge.  He keens and arches his back, and yeah, he just totally forgot studying is even a thing people do.  He makes the cutest noises when you fuck with him, keep your hands just a little too gentle to give him pain.  Drives him motherfucking  _crazy_.

And then he looks up at your face and sees you watching him, and he smiles through watering eyes and your pusher does a double-beat at how you pity him.

“… _hey there_ ,” you say to him, really quiet, and your voice doesn’t sound right, even to your own ears.  “…Gamzee.”

“Hey,” he says back, soft and shaking, and then he opens his mouth and he stops.  Frowns.  “I,” he says.  “…well fuck.  I ain’t got the slightest clue what to call you.”

\--

Your old man stares at you for a long, long second, and his hand squeezes on your side as he thinks.  Loosens.  Then tight again.  You hope to god you didn’t fuck this up, it’s so rare when he says your actual name to you and it makes you melt in his hands and purr, and if he doesn’t do it again you’re gonna be so motherfucking mad with yourself—

“…Kurloz,” he says, so soft you almost miss it.  “…a long…long time ago, little one.  Haven’t been called that in an age.”

Everything you got inside you tightens up in a knot and then catches on fire and melts into hot air, all in the space of a breath.  You fill up with light inside.  “Kurloz,” you repeat after him, and he nods.  It  _tastes_  old, strange, like holy ashes.  You bury your face in his neck and roll it around in your mouth.  “… _Kurloz_.  ‘S a fine-ass name.”

He rumbles deep down low in his chest, amused.  “Don’t wear it out.”

“Don’t want to forget, is all.”  You press into him again, breathe in deep.  “… _Kurloz._ ”

“Forget?”  He laughs at you.  “—even you couldn’t do that, wriggler, for all your brain is rot.  But I can  _quiz_  you if you want.”  His fingers slide down your sides, ticklish, then pinch your grubscars in that way he  _knows_  makes you squeak every time.  “Pretty easy questions.”  He presses his fingers hard into your bruised back.  You chirp, startled and pleased, as he worries at those bruises—then you just lean into it and sigh.  “What’s my name?”

“ _—k-kurloz—_ ”

He nods above you, satisfied, and you can feel the muscle under the skin of his arms, his chest, shifting as he moves.  He walks his fingers lower from bruise to bruise—you squirm but he ignores you, refusing to go any faster or press any harder.  He wraps an arm around you, pins you there against his chest and drags the tip of a claw down the ridges of your horns as his other hand goes lower and lower.

“ _What’s my name_?” He murmurs, and his fingers spread around the tight stretch of your nook from behind, kneading and you try to answer and instead squeak something that ain’t words by any sense.  He laughs that bone-rumbling, purring laugh that makes you shudder.    He loves that, how as soon as he starts touchin’ you you completely lose track of how to even  _think_  on sayin’ stuff.  He likes to ask you questions when you’re right out of it and then fuck your shit up for not answerin’. (Not like you ever try to hard anyway, you guess.)

“ _K—_ “ you get out, a breathless little click of a sound.  “ _K-kur—loz—!_ ”

“ _Mm_ ,” he hums, and taps the tip of one claw against the spot right between your bulge and your nook that makes you see stars.  “ _Good._   Sounds nice when you say it like that, little one,  _real_  motherfuckin’ nice…”

“ _Yes_ ,” you gasp, and he keeps teasing that spot with the tips of his claws, giving you pressure and then pulling away again, it’s been such a long time since that time three days ago and you’re actually stressed as all hell (you don’t miss much about sopor, but this, this weird, harried state of pan you got yourself in, this can go fuck itself).  Your nerves are overwrought and your body just crumples to his touch.   “Yes yes yes  _please—_ ” You twist a little bit loose in his arms and stretch way up to kiss him, and he chuckles and indulges you, not rough but not quite gentle either.  His fingers find your full nook from behind again and he pushes and presses and rubs not hard enough quite to hurt.  You slump and melt and kiss every bit of him you can reach, grateful, and he laughs some more and rocks you on the shift and swell of his bulge through his pants.  It’s a hot, heavy pressure on the toy in your nook and you whine and tremble.

“… _’bout time we give you the next size up, huh?_ ”  He murmurs against your ear, and you groan, grinding down on him.  Your whole back is throbbing where he beat you last time, your shoulders right down to the backs of your knees and the toy he’s got in you feels bigger all over again, rocking on him and pretending it’s his.  “ _Nngh—_ yeah, that’s a good boy, that’s good—you feelin’ those bruises yet?  _Know what they motherfuckin’ mean_?”  He gets his big hands on your ass and squeezes and it  _aches_ , leaves you breathless.  His voice is a snarl that hums up and down your horns and into your bones.  “… _means you’re_ mine.”

 _God_  yes, yes, yes yes yes—

“ _Yes,_ ” you say, shaky and weak and not deserving of that great, glorious proclamation, the star-shaker of a growl it came from.  “ _Yes, please—fuck,_ yes—”

He groans and pulls you closer to him.  You can hearing him panting soft and harsh in your ear as you grind down on him; it’s such a power trip, knowing how much you get to him, how bad he wants you sometimes when he seems so motherfuckin’ untouchable.  You press down on him with everything you’ve got and both of you moan.

“ _You’ll be the death of me, wriggler,_ ” he groans, and he catches one of your ears in his teeth and tugs just hard enough to hurt.  “ _Second I know you can take it,_ that very second _you’re taking my bulge_ hard _I’m going to make you fucking_ scream—”

You almost  _do_  scream of that, you have to catch it in your chest because he’s still talking to you, snarling in your ear, telling you what he wants to do for you, you  _have_  to hear  _every word_.  So you just gasp and whimper and nod, and he leans forward and kisses you so fierce and hard you taste blood and your whole thinkpan just throws up its hands and goes  _FUCK IT I’M DONE_.  Most of the times he makes you come he has time to work you up to it, torturous and slow, and you don’t really have enough of your pan functioning to feel what’s happening to you—or at least, not enough to understand what all stuff your body is sending you.  But you don’t white out this time, you drop hard and fast and you feel every goddamn second of it. 

And then you just lie on top of him, scorched-out and hollow, and shake.

“Well,” he says, and he sounds like he finds you funny again, there’s a half a laugh in his voice.  “…say it like that and you can call me by name all you want.”

You make a sort of “ _Nnguh?_ ” noise.  And then you piece apart what just happened, think it through in hindsight and realize that when you screamed, instead of a wordless wail, it came out his name.  For no real reason as you can think of, your ears go hot. 

“ _Sweetest little brother_ ,” he purrs, and you can’t help but smile when you shift and his breath catches in him, just a little.  “… _I’m not ever going to get tired of you._ ”

He has you recite your choicest scripture at him as you finish him off as well, and you suppose that counts as studying, or as close to studying as don’t-give-a-fuck. 

You get the highest score on the ship in Scripture and Liturgy, sitting weird in your seat and praying to the messiahs that for your diligence you may be rewarded by not leaving a tacky wet spot on your seat.  And lo, even though you get out of there walking funny at the memory of the noises he made as you read him those same scriptures, your prayers are answered. 

You walk outta there and you are a fully trained subjugglator, you are a laughsassin of first caliber.  You straighten up your back and you feel tall and powerful.  You roll your shoulders and imagine yourself as you were standing there and looking up at you, small and thin and weak.  You could pick up who you were with one hand.  You could motherfucking  _break_  him.

You wonder how tall you are now, standing next to the old man ( _next to Kurloz_ ) and you grin to yourself and holler out to the corridor  _WHOOP WHOOP_  and your classmates raise a raucous cheer back at you, tired as fuck and beat all to hell but finally motherfucking victorious. 


	4. His First Mission

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning that this chapter includes non-explicit but heavily-implied sex and torture, both nonconsensual. No details, just implications.

The kid has his first full mission a week after he makes it through his last test, and he is fit to fucking burst.  He’s so excited he comes in to see you some days and then basically just totally forgets he was here to pail you at all, just blathers at the top of his aeration sponges and so fast you hardly follow and then kisses you full on the mouth with a strong taste of strawberry elixir and goes bounding out to…polish his clubs or something, you’re not sure.  It’s totally fuckin’ precious anyway, is the important part, and you laugh a lot to see him so fully motherfucking enthused.  It’s just a simple little thing, a tip-off to a rogue ship in orbit of a warring planet, sending out signals under the approved networks to try to find filthy fucking rebels and help them break away from imperial control.  It’s him and seventeen others, fully enough to take on a single ship of lowbloods, and you have it on the report that their guns aren’t working and their understocked on strife specibi.

You should have known, in full clarity of hindsight.  You know you should have known.  Should have sniffed out that there was something too easy here.

You had a turncoat in your ranks, and that was the failing; you had a turncoat who was willing to betray the church, the _family_ , and whisper you falsehoods on weapons and numbers and strength.  You wish you could have showed that traitor the full extent of your truest platonic hatred, but the shitbloods wouldn’t have let them live after they were done with their betrayal.  They’ll be floating in empty space somewhere right now, a cold corpse, and you hope they’re bled out eternally to paint the walls of the carnival’s darkest pits.  It is a single ship but it is armed.  It is a single crew but the ship is full up with them to the vents.  It is a simple mission, but it is now one for twice the hands and twice the caution, and you sent them into it at full tilt and eyes bright to do holy work, and they went without a second of caution, not a moment to hesitate.

 _The answers your coldblooded freaks provided us were of great assistance to our cause_ , says the voice in the video they send you, warped and bent on itself, and you get a flash, just a flash, of bodies writhing, screaming, of purple blood everywhere, shattered horns and broken skin. _Have the empress surrender the planet Arenin or we will spread the secrets we’ve learned to the entire galaxy.  And all of your brainwashed highblood slaves will end up just like these did._

It goes black, and the chorus of agony dies out on the end of a single echo of a lingering scream.

You know that scream.  You know it far, far too well.

You hold yourself inside your skin just long enough to grit out through your teeth, _get.  The fuck.  OUT._ And they run for their lives as your growl rises to a snarl rises to a scream.  You are all of fury and fire, you are smashing walls and roaring to your empty throne room.  You are taken wild, like you haven’t been for a hundred sweeps.

And then you are spent.

It’s in that quiet after your holy rage that you start to think all things through.  They’ve been gone two, almost three nights.  They would have reached their target maybe a night and a half of flight, and from there they were captured.  A night and a half.

You don’t even inform your empress the message has been sent.  You will do many things, but you  _will not bow._ You will give many things but _not the motherfucking DIGNITY OF THE CHURCH._ You talk to all those as knew anything about the mission.  You scan for five imperial sectors around, which is a most generous of all generous estimates for the distance they could have travelled if even they had an imperial-level helm.  You find nothing but what’s as should be there.  You find motherfucking _nothing._ Little shitbloods have stolen your own and they have up and motherfucking  _vanished._

They wait less than a day before they ping you again.

This time the voices aren’t mangled like last time.  They’re growing bolder—or they have something they need you to hear.  You listen for it. _You are drawn fucking taut with listening silence._

 _Guess who we have_ , says the video, and it is an immediate knowledge; you know they’ve found out.  You can only take a breath and let it out again.   _My lord_ Grand Highblood, _you’re taking some risks, sending someone out someone so valuable._

Nobody dares to glance up at you, but you feel their attention shift to you, curious and terrified and sickened.  They’re confused.  This is a message just for you, after all.  These fuckers think they can taunt _you_? _You_ who can shatter planets with a word?  You who have lived longer than any but the empress herself?   _They would send this to you in mockery?!_

You’re going to find them, and you’re going to slaughter them all.  And you’re going to  _take your time._ You can do everything you’ve ever done to your matesprit, everything that ever made him cling to you and purr and praise your messiahs.  You’ll see how these godless motherfuckers like them. 

_Tell him,_ says the voice.  There’s silence, and then a growl, a meaty sound, a soft, harsh little noise.  You know well. _Fully motherfucking acquainted_.  That is the sound of something striking flesh.  A noise of pain.

 _I said fucking_ talk _, you clown-worshipping freak!_

Another silence.  And then, “… _go fuck your lusus_ ,” slurs Gamzee’s voice, giddy and trembling with those little, convulsive giggles he does when he’s in pain, and against all odds, you have to laugh.  It’s an explosion of a sound, furious and amused, and the rest of the faithful gathered jump and flinch away from the noise.  “ _Inna…words’f the holy messiahs,_  a hundred motherfuckers can’t tell me n _—nnhh—_!”

 _\--told you it was a bad idea he’s a goddamn_ freak _it doesn’t even—_

_\--shut it off—_

_\--no are you crazy, come on—_

Gamzee is still laughing, high little barks of sound, breathless like he’s just heard the best joke in the world and he can’t stop laughing, and someone swears and you hear them hit him—he spits wetly and goes right back to laughing. 

“ _Miss you, old man_!”  He declares, and laughs at himself.  “— _you should see all the blood I got in me, shit’s miraculous how it just keeps coming out and_ fuck— _fuck_ , god—oh god, yes—!” wet sounds, pain sounds, and he gasps and groans.

 _Oh my god I tried to_ tell _you he’s not going to send the right message, he’s a_ freak— 

_We’ll kill him!_ says the voice, and it sounds really fucking unnerved and you are laughing so goddamn hard that _him_  they would try to torture, _him_ they would try to make you fearful for.  _I swear we will!  Tell the Empress to withdraw her forces from the planet!_

_Cut it, cut the message—_

The screen blanks out, and you laugh so hard you can’t breathe.  And then you put your hands on the table, bow your head, and pray for the Messiahs to see you clear through this egregious amount of fuckery.

When you’re done with that (it takes a bit of a time, this is truly egregious fuckery and there is no mistaking that) you straighten up again and growl a little in your chest, thinking.  There has to be a way to track them down, for all space is so miraculous huge and your ship’s helms can only drive it so fast.  There has to be something, because in your experience (your long, long experience) there is never a time when you are helpless.  Not entirely. 

Thinking gets pretty hard, though, because you keep getting sidetracked by your rage, having to get it back under control; your thoughts all eaten up by how you’re going to hunt them down and make their deaths last the rest of a painful lifetime. (And if they want to plead for mercy it’s too late now because if they ever wanted to see mercy again they should have thought about that before they  _STOLE YOUR MOTHERFUCKING DESCENDANT.)_

…wait.

Your. _Descendant._

“…Leieta,” you say, even and measured and quiet as a sinner in confessionihilation.  “…we got sensors for brain fuckery on board this ship.  Work over a long way, right, someone told me when we got them.” (Long time ago, you recall, it’s been a while.  You weren’t really listening either.  But you think that’s what they said.

Leieta’s your metal-head—he looks all shaky all over, but he clears his throat and mumbles a some-kind-of-yes.  Good enough for you.  “…but, but even if we knew that any of them had ancestral chucklevoodoo, I,” he runs a hand through his hair; he’s sweating at the temples, his paint is smearing.  “…I, they, without an exact imprint of their psychic wavelength, there’s no way we could find a single troll in the empire—”

“Scan for mine.” 

They all stare at you, and you give them an example of your voodoos right in the pans, not subtle and wheedling as you are wont to, but head on and blasting into them.  They flinch away from you.  “... _you search for that,_ ” you tell them, and only one of them has the globes to say “—but—” before you snarl and she does as she’s told.  You aren’t meant or made to keep up more than a whisper for more than a few minutes, but that’s plenty long enough for them to home in on you and your pan and the echo and screech of your power.  All the sensors howl at you, angry machine voices telling you  _what the fuck he’s right here on the ship_ , but you look hard and long, and you look for a single, far away point…

There.

There, a few sectors from you, the ship is hidden behind a planet’s vast, shattered rings, the tiniest hint of a shadow even when you’re looking for it, but in that shadow there is a little, pulsing, distant star of light.  An exact echo of your powers.

“But,” whispers Leieta, and touches the screen, brushing a finger over the little star of light.  “…but that’s—there’s no way, unless…”

They all turn to look at you, and you see a few of them realize it, right then and right there.  The reason that message was sent to you just now, special.  The reason you keep him so close at your side.  The reasons for a lot of things.

“Live long enough, maybe you’ll see yours too, some day,” you tell them, and roll your neck.  “ _Found them_.” You bare your teeth and growl your satisfaction, and everyone forgets to be amazed at you and at your little most precious descendant and goes still instead, waiting.  “…get a raiding team together.   Stealth only, they got no way of knowing we’re coming up on them and we can motherfuckin’ keep it that way.”

“…’we’?” 

You don’t answer.  You just turn back to them, draw your clubs, and smile.

\-- 

The ship is a little shithole of a thing.  You slide up behind it as silent as one of the massive pieces of stone floating around it, and their tech is so old it takes one of your more metal-minded sisters less than a minute on her palmhusk to have the bay doors sliding open.

Your shuttle can have less than a tenth of the trolls on board as are on this boat.  You are going to tear them to shreds.

The doors close and by the instant people have started to look over, to exclaim to one another _ain’t that wrong_ and  _I don’t know that ship_ , you have five mirthful swinging onto the roof of the shuttle, drawing bead and dropping them like flies.  The church has always been more in approval of weapons that break bone and splatter blood, but ain’t nothin’ in scripture  _don’t shoot those motherfuckers in the head_.  There are ten in the hangar with you; by the time the doors of your shuttle open, all but the nearest one to you are dead.

It’s a little blueblood, and when he sees you his face goes relieved and then terrified and then relieved again.  He’s got a powerful job of scarring done on his face and what you can see of his hands.  His horns are both snapped off at the bases, so it looks like he don’t even have them.  Around his neck, a collar.  Around his legs, shackles.

“The prisoner faithful,” is the first thing you say to him, snarling, and he nods with eyes so wide and grateful.  “ _Where are they_."

“Down—down two levels,” he babbles, “—or, or, or maybe three, I, they’re down by the storage hull, you’ll know it when you get there, the whole place stinks like blood, please—”

“ _Thanks_ ,” you say, and smash his skull.  For his help you wish him less suffering in the carnival, off-hand to whoever is listening out there, but he is not one of your own and you have no desire to be his savior.  You kick his body under the walkway of the shuttle and then you take off for the doors at the back of the room, sticking to shadows.

For all your size, for all you haven’t been in the field in so long, you have always been good at being invisible and silent as darkness.  You think to when you were a wriggler, no older than Gamzee is now, when you would melt into shadows and pretend your mouth was stitched, your tongue torn out.  Nothing could startle a cry out of you.  You were nothingness.

Someone comes through the door as you come up to it along the wall; you reach out and he doesn’t even have time to cry out before you twist his head off his shoulders.  Brown.  The hot spill of blood over your hands brings you up and out of the pit in your pan, and you blink and breathe.

“ _…do as I say, children,_ ” you murmur to them, “— _not as I do.  Leave no trail of corpses. Give ‘em a crack on the pan and find the prisoners before they know we’re here. Kalyat, get the bridge.  Ihkala, cull their helmsman._ ”  You flick a hand; they take off.  Your best and brightest can be trusted off on their own; they have sweeps of battle on their shoulders, they can take care of themselves.  You take the youngest with you, and you head straight down.

The bowels of the ship are full of the smell of rotten food and shit—they’ve got pipe-leaks somewhere, and nobody has ever bothered to fix it, what a shitheap.  Lowbloods don’t deserve to pilot ships they can’t even fucking take care of, god.  But in the stench of shit and leaking fuel and rotting food stores, you can smell the thinnest trace of blood.  You hold up a hand and everyone stops as you sniff the air, but your nose is as old as the rest of you and you can’t pinpoint it.  You pull your brothers and sisters forward.

“…smell that?”  You ask them, and they sniff the air.  One or two of them nod.  “Find it,  _seek it the fuck out._ ”

They spread out, smelling the air, eyes bright and hands twitching on their weapons.  And then one of them straightens up and beckons you.

He’s standing next to a vent.  When you bend down and sniff the air, the smell of blood is a stronger, seeping up from below on a breeze of rising hot air.  You listen real close and right on the edge of your hearing there is a faint sound, someone moaning over and over again, the soft noises of a pain that doesn’t gentle with time.

“Down one level,” you growl, and you stand up and pull out your clubs for the first time.  Everyone backs away from you in a real hurry.  “ _We’re close.”_

“Sir.”

It’s a little brother, Uderak, you think—tiny and stunted as Gamzee used to be, hungry around the eyes and in the bony hands.  His knives are barely bigger than his claws, but the poisons and drugs he puts on them hit hard and fast.  His culling exam was something to behold.

“I could fit down that,” he says.  “I could fit down there.”

Leaving him locked in there with them.  You frown.  “—and what good do you think you could do,” you growl, and you hear, far away, someone start to yell, cut off.  Your laughsassins and your subjugglators spreading out through the ship.  You only have a little time before they realize that you’re here, before they mobilize all together and start tryin’ to hunt you down.  How far you’ve gotten before they do will be the difference.

“If they find out we’re here before we reach the cell they could kill the prisoners,” says little Uderak, talking fast and quiet.  “I could protect them long enough for you to find me, if we get sunk up slurry creek without a bucket, milord.”

You have no time to think on this long and hard.  You give yourself three seconds, and then you nod.  You’re far stronger than anyone else here; you get your nails under the bolted metal and  _wrench_ and it comes off the wall.  Uderak swings himself inside, draws two knives and glances back up at you.

“ _I’ll give ‘em a show,_ ” he says, all on fire behind his eyes.  “Whoop-whoop.”

And then he’s gone.  You get up and jerk your head and they follow you at a run, headed for the next passage down, to the smell of blood and the darkness below.

By the time you get down a level, you can hear the sounds of someone fighting, someone yelling, and you follow it immediately.  There are three lowbloods at the bottom of the stairs to the lowest level of the ship; Uderak is holding ground, backing up, leading them away from a dark doorway that is full of the foul stench of dying trolls.  The third troll collapses as you reach the bottom of the stairs; he has a long cut on his face, must be from one of Uderak’s drugged knives.

One lowblood has some kind of psionics and she’s flashing them around, sending sparks at your brother’s face; Uderak’s eye is a charred-up, smoking pit, but there are lowblood bodies convulsing on the ground.  Even as you look he pitches a knife overarm and gets the psionic in the shoulder.  She’s another brown; she grunts and then seconds later her eyes widen and roll back in her head and she drops onto the ground and starts foaming at the mouth and thrashing around.  The other lowblood roars and snatches Uderak out of the air, pins him against a wall—

Your clubs catch him in the ribs, crush him against the other wall so hard his body goes all dented-in and broken.  He gurgles and makes dying noises.  You step past Uderak, draw back a foot, and stomp down with all your weight.

The noises stop.

“It’s bad,” Uderak is wheezing, as you wipe blood off your boot on the corpse’s shirt.  “They’re—it’s not good, milord—”

“Alive?” 

“Most of them, I think most of them, but they’re messed up real motherfuckin’ bad—”

“All as have some kind of mediculler training, with me,” you snap, and stride past him—ruffle his bloody hair once.  “Rest of you hang back, wait for my orders.  Someone get Kalyat and Ihkala on comm, and give me good gospel, children, don’t want a word of bad news now.”

“Sir,” says someone, and they hurry off to get it done as you walk forward, not a hint of hesitation, towards the room where they’re keeping the prisoners.

You have seen many a block made for torture in your time, you have seen every perversity and agony that can be done to trollflesh, and you are too old and too well-worn for disbelief or for numbness.  You know what you see and it spells itself out for you in its entirety, as clear and cold as your empress’s voice in your ear.

There are eighteen of them in this tiny room, the full team, legs all threaded together and blood-sticky, shoulder to shoulder to ruined shoulder.  The room is small as a single block back on your flagship, hot as a motherfucking sauna for coldbloods like you, full of the reek of blood and flesh and shit and piss and every smell of misery.  He is surrounded by his brothers and sisters; they crawl like frightened grubs as your shadow blocks the light, they whine and curl up in pain.  They are wrecked, and in ways that cannot be made motherfucking whole again, they are ruined and weeping.  Some of them don’t even move when you pull open the door; dead, or so close as no matter.

And in the middle of them all, in the center where the light of the open door falls on him, there is your matesprit, your little one, lashed up to the wall with rough, badly-made cuffs.  He does not flinch away from your footfall like the others do; he is far, far gone.  You recognize the way he shakes, how far away are his eyes, how broken the little noises that spill out of his slack mouth.  It’s a beautiful thing, when you have the time and the inclination to take him this far.

It’s less beautiful when your hand is not part of it.  Blood in every minute shade of purple runs into rusty drains.  Blood in every minute, precious shade of your own blood stains dirty tools.

You are calm as the spaces between the stars.

“Take this ship apart,” you say, quiet and smooth.  “…take these pieces of shitblood filth in for inquisition,  _all of them_.  Don’t hurt them.  _Don’t harm a single.  Motherfucking.  One_.”

You hear your faithful take off behind you, hear the sound of horns and low chuckles that echo in the vents, hear someone whoop, high and fleeting in the distance, and know they will follow your orders.  You do not follow.  You have no need to see the bloodshed; you’ll shed blood, you’ll shed  _MOTHERFUCKING RIVERS OF WARM SHITBLOOD SWILL_ once they’re caught and chained up for your pleasure in your little rooms.  You should be here.  You should be with your (matesprit) descendant.  You should be with your motherfucking own.  With your brothers and sisters who are stirring now, hearing for lack of blinded eyes, making plea but lacking tongues, pushing themselves away from you on the stumps and mangled remains of their limbs, full of pure and animal fear.

You say prayer of mirth for their souls and you finally heed their cries for death.

There are a few, less touched, more whole, who will scar and grow back bent but who aren’t quite ready to check their tickets yet—those you break loose of their chains and leave to be taken back to cooler places, where the blood on the walls is not their own.  Some of them recognize you; they hail messiahs to you, on some faded instinct on the edge of consciousness, and you hail back, soft as serendipity most pale, give them the facts,  _your prayers are answered and the heretics captured_ , and see the spark of vicious relief in them before you leave them to be lifted and carried away by their brothers and sisters.

Some of them have quadrants, come on this mission with so little hope of seeing them again.  You hear weeping and you hear laughter, you hear soft shooshing and the jagged sobs of one who has seen their one and only truest rival brought to the ground and still fighting.  Maybe six of them can be saved, with messiahs’ blessing.  Two of those six are ruined, but they are your hardiest fighters, strongest pushers—you hope for them, and maybe they can still fight through this.

You come to him last. Most of the wounds you can see on him, you have done to him at one time or another.  But you have stayed your hand; cut here, and let him heal.  Claw there, and let him scar.  You haven’t ever done to him all these at once, and his blood is splattered paint, on the walls, on the floor.  You are used to seeing him take all you give him, and then stopping when you see he can take no more; the sight of him pushed beyond that boundary, of sweat and drool and vomit and tears streaked on his face, none of that sated contentment but a drawn weariness of long fear, of too much sensation drowning his pan, of no sleep…

…it does something inside you.  A simple little  _snap_ like a rope breaking.  You feel the fury well up inside you and you settle the weight of hundreds of sweeps of age, of  _patience_ , against that unreasoning rage.  You will rage later.  The luckiest of your new prisoners, you will rip limb from limb and kill them quick and brutal; you will pour your rage on them.  Not here.  Not now.

You note, distant, that someone has fucked him.  There’s splashes of green on his claw-marked and trembling thighs, and you’ll find out whose it is if you have to wrench it from their mouths along with every tooth.  (You saw those signs on others, didn’t you, less there and less fresh, but there’s no questions they been making foul use of your own,  _MOST FOUL FUCKING USE_.)  It wouldn’t touch his pan—doubt they could even make themselves well-felt fucking him, with him aiming so high and pushing himself so hard to pail you properly some night—but it makes you snarl to yourself.  He is yours—as are they all, but he is  _yours._ Yours to break and hold and bleed and pity.  _Yours._

You touch his face—

You hear the chains snap taut before you even see him move.  His claws sink into your arm, as close to your throat as they can go with the chains on his wrists, he  _keens_ at you through bloody teeth, _“LEAVE THEM THE MOTHERFUCK ALONE YOU HEINOUS HERETIC SONS OF BITCHES!!”_

His eyes are pure red under the purple, his mouth is ripped up one cheek to show all his bloody fangs, his claws dig in so hard anybody else would have their arm broken, his growls are broken with whimpers and whines and he is so small again, just like he was when you saw him first, coming on your ship with skinny bones and big eyes and staring at you like you were his gods both in one.  He’s trying to protect his brothers and sisters.  Too far gone to see you, too far gone to even react to all the pain as must be racking him now, and still he fights at you and growls for them.

You lean down and he snaps at you, but you lay your head between his horns and run your fingers through the bloody knots of his hair.

“ _Gamzee,_ ” you tell him, so quiet it can’t go beyond the two of you, the air you’re breathing together.  “ _My little one._ You’re a motherfucking credit, little brother.  _You did good._ ”

He chews at you and claws, but he’s weak—all that strength he had for a second of violence is draining from him, leaving him broken and tired beyond measuring.  He can’t even break through the chitin of your gear with his weak snaps and snarls, his claws leave only violet welts that will fade before you reach the fleet again, and he is so small and made for your pity.    You hold him and hold him and purr, pressing him against the sound in the pit of your chest, and he subsides into tired, panting silence.

“ _Gamzee,_ ” you say again, and this time he groans and he shivers.

“… _ow…_ ” he says, barely a whisper, and you— _you_ —you are _frightened_.  You haven’t ever heard him make a noise so broken, so… _in pain._ He screams, he cries, but always with that edge of exaltation and fire.  Never tiny and quiet and sad.  And then, “ _…’loz…_ ” he croaks, and his hands come up and hold to you, all tremble and ache and weakness.  “… _wh…?_ ”

“Came and got you back,” you murmur to him.  “Caught a full ship of heretics, on the side.” He makes a sound almost a laugh—there’s something buried in his chest, right through aeration sponge and through to his back and he chokes on it, spits blood down his chin.  “We saved all as could be saved.”

“ _And._ ” His cheeks are streaked purple; watering eyes or tears, you don’t know.  It’s the shaky movement of a troll a tenth your age when you wipe a drop away with one thumb, and he turns his face into your hand and don’t say a word in judgment.  “… _the—others—_ ”

“Got ring-side seats to the endless show,” you comfort, and he takes a shaky breath.  His face is crumpling-soft under his paint and his blood; he tries half a smile, starts to mouth “— _hail m…messiahs—_ ” and it shatters, cracks and burns and rots away as an ugly sob.

Someone steps to the door and starts to speak—you half-turn enough to snarl and they leave right away without a single word.

He is diminished in your arms when you lift him to carry him out, and he doesn’t hold back his mourning; never been one for holding back, not him.  He is open where you are not—haven’t been for a hundred sweeps.  When you carry him out to the last of the raiding party there are worried faces under angry warpaint and people gathered around as he makes shaking tired sobs into your chest.  Even those who have picked fights with him, who have tried and failed to get into better graces with you than he is (they’ve never known just by how  _much_ that is never going to be) are shaking and furious, wound up to do bloody murder and pain on the enemies who threaten your church from without.  And they are few and far in minority among those who have warmed to him, befriended him, respected him as one of your favorites and a brother who leads the service with devotion.  His pain is well-marked by the faces around you.  _His pain is well and truly fucking marked._

Someone takes up his cry, and there is a great, rising wail of loss that rises and falls away, full of great, sobbing jags of laughter, full of joy at the captives’ return, full of hate and fury for those who you’ll torture, later, full of exaltation for the ascension of worthy souls to the dark carnival and mourning for them all leaving you behind to go so early.  When it’s gone, it takes some of the pain all locked up in his pan away with it, and he slumps, face against your chest and he is utterly, finally spent.


	5. Best Friend

You capture more than three dozen, all told.  They are fearful as they should be.  They are motherfucking  _sick_  with holy terror,  _AS THEY MOTHERFUCKING SHOULD BE._   One of them tries to plead with you, and you pick him up and you  _TEAR HIS FUCKING JAW OFF_  and drop him on the ground to bleed.  Someone will burn the flesh so he doesn’t bleed out.  He’ll be whole enough to pay for his crimes. 

The faithful who survived are under the care of their brothers and sisters, unconscious back on your shuttle.  You tie up your prisoners in great struggling masses and throw them into the hold with crushed ankles, and you go to offer up some prayers of great and  _most fucking heartfelt_  thanks to your messiahs.

Then you go and see the empress.

“Somefin went down over there,” she says, as soon as you walk in, and frowns at you all like you been a bad wriggler.  For all her sweeps she does look so young compared to you.  For all her size she does look so small.  “What you been reefing out of your rayports, Kurloz?  What you figure you tidin’ from me?”  She throws herself up off of her throne and sweeps her hair back, beckons you  _follow._   “Walk with me, mothaglubber.”

“Church business,” you rumble, deep and final as you can, but that trick don’t work on her like it works on everyone else.  She just scowls at you as you set of walking, roaming all through her gold and fuschia hallways.

“Yeah, shore, like globes,” she says derisively.  “Listen, I don’t coral if you wanna do all your shitty clownfish stuff without botherin’ me, I can’t undersand a swordfish you say when you’re talkin’ clowns. Figured you was just suddenly having another big tide a your weird-ass faith, right?  But you go out all  _snappersonal_ -like to deal with something like one single little missin’ team?  Clam the fuck on.”

You laugh, because goddamn, for somebody as acts like she doesn’t care she sure is doin’ a lot of those fish puns she does when she’s upset.  But whatever.  She quiets a bit and looks at you.

“…who is it?”  She asks.

You.  You admit you jump a touch at that, even if only inside where she can’t see.  Your guts clench all up inside. 

“Who is who?”  You ask, smooth as sin, and pick yellow blood out of under your claws.  “Know a lot of ‘ _who_ ’s, Meenah.”

She hits you.  Fuckin’ ow.

“ _Who_  did you go after?”  She insists.  “Who’d you go after all prawnsonal, who’s been makin’ you so fucking  _content_  these couple of sweeps here,  _who’d you find_?  You’re old as globes and I figured you’d never salmon up the strayngth to get hooked into hearts at your age, but all of a sodden this old anglerfish got it reel bad.”

She hasn’t called you that in a while.  A while of whiles.  It touches you, somehow, for all you want to knock her over and stop the conversation right here and now.  She told you once, when you were young and you had somewhere to be ambitious to get to, when you had your eye on the lordship you got now, she told you you were “a creefy little fuck, all luring everybody onto your tide like an anglerfish.”  And she’d call you that, when you hooked up for a one-day pile, when she knocked your feet out from under you and kissed you all pitch and nasty and then vanished for tens of sweeps straight.  _You dumbass clown._    _You ship-head mime.  You cunning old anglerfish._

When you got two trolls who have been for as long as you two have been, you get…fishtory.

You figured you’d been less than obvious about your new quadrant-filling, but you guess it was only a matter of time before the old bitch figured out you had something new going on.  And you have been in a mood uncommon good these nights.  The holy fleet has not for a hundred sweeps taken so many a traitor or turned out so might a force of inquisition and confession.

“His name’s Gamzee,” you say, having it out before she has to drag it out of you by inches, and she goes  _mmmmm-hm_  like  _yeah totally called it._   You pinch her fin.  She punches you in the bulge.  You don’t actually make any embarrassing noises, but you come pretty close.  Fucking hell.  Fuck short people, god.

“Clamzee,” she says, thoughtful.  “…I got a speshell case who knew some buoy by that name.”  She glances at you and half-opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, but then she closes it again and she shuts up.  You’re grateful for that—you don’t want to go through the fuckery about  _you got a descendant?!_  And then the next layer of fuckery, which is all being,  _YOU’RE FUCKING YOUR DESCENDANT?!_ You are not up for that talk just now.  Especially not with fish puns all thick in and throughout.  “…worries about the kid a  _lot_.  All kindsa touching.  Wish he’d just send a message or somefin eel-eddy, but he’s way too stubborn and nubby and busy floundering around trying to keep himself hemoanon.  Meh, whateva.”  She glubs and pulls out a sparkly thing of the stuff she uses to make her lips shiny, layering some more on her mouth as is already shiny enough to signal a fuckin’ starship with, god.  “He makes you shella happy, Kurloz.”

You sigh and roll your eyes and imagine his stupid, happy face.  “…yeah,” you admit.  “Yeah he does.”

“And he got capshored.”

Your happy falls right off of you.  You are all bristle and snarl again.

“ _Yeah_.”

“How bad’s he hurt?”  She’s not looking at you; she’s stopped at a window, looking out.  “Hooking like he’ll pull through?”

You don’t want to talk about that, because saying ‘yes’ is like thinking about how he could  _not_  and by the messiahs  _that is not an option_.  “Yeah,” you say, sharp as knives and heavy as moons.  “He’ll be fucking  _fine._ ”

She pats your arm, and you relax a little bit despite yourself.  She’s got hands even cooler than yours.  If you were a lot younger and a lot less in control of your instincts, you would be dreaming about her cold hands on your face right now, but you ain’t young and you certainly ain’t dreaming.  Fuck her.

“Keep some of them alive for me,” she says, and grins like a shark.  “I want this rebayllion  _over._   We clear?”

“Tidally, fishter,” you say glibly, and then you both burst out laughing.

\--

You’re not there when Gamzee wakes up; you’re coming out of the holy inquisition rooms, wiping blood and tears off your hands, closing the door on the sound of slowly-weakening screams.  When you close the door and turn around, Rishet is waiting for you. 

“The survivors are awake,” she says, barely above a whisper—little sister never talks more than she has an absolute need to, she’s real quiet.  You mightily approve.  Makes her the best of laughsassins.  “Gamzee Makara is asking for you.”

You haven’t ever crossed the ship so fast in your life.

When you find where the prisoners are resting, there is good and ill news to find; one of the two that were worst hurt, who you hoped to fight through regardless, has had last rites and abandoned ruined flesh.  The other is not dead but sickened, burning up with fever.  But those who you judged best and whole, they are all but one awake and sitting up.  They bow their heads to you when you come in, all of them thanking, praising.  You walk through and let them see you, lay a hand on you, thank you for coming for them, and don’t let show you are all clear and all focus on the furthest ‘coon.  Ain’t like you don’t care about your other little brothers and sisters, but…

Gamzee is dozing, hanging half out of his recuperacoon, when you reach him.  He’s bare-face, not like most of the others who have gotten up and cleaned; there are patched-up scars across his face, and his face itself all still and quiet and tired.  You figure for a while if you should wake him up because he was all askin’ for you, or if you should let him sleep as he definitely needs to, but before you have to make your decision he stirs a little bit and groans, muffled against the rim of his ‘coon.

When you tug on a curl of his sopor-slicked hair, he groans again and raises his head.  When he sees you, he smiles.  When he moves, he winces.

“ _Kurloz_ ,” he says again, and you should tell him off about using your name where other people could hear it but it’s all quiet and shaky and sweet and it ain’t like anyone else can hear him anyway.  He pulls himself up a little and catches at the hand as you used to play with his hair, squeezing.  “…you gone and been a miracle.”

Takes you aback.  “Don’t you look at me like that, wriggler,” you say, and it doesn’t come out not nearly as growly as you mean it to.  “…we got fucked over and I didn’t catch it, don’t you look at me like I—”

“ _I thought I was gonna die._ ”

You stop and breathe.  His hand squeezes around your claws, although he doesn’t look at your face.  His eyes are fixed on the ground; his eyesockets got a look all thin and bruised about them, all dark around his eyes. 

“… _figured myself for dead,_ ” he repeats, and he pulls your hand to him and presses his skull against your old, worn-up finger-bones.  “And there you came, I—I prayed for you,  _fuck_ , I prayed you’d come, I—”

He trails off.  His hands are getting bigger, stronger, still spidery and long-fingered like yours, but not skeletal anymore, not as small against your own.  He holds on to you with his battered-up, scarred fingers like you’re made of brittle glass.

You ain’t got an answer for him, but he doesn’t seem to need one; he holds on to you until he slowly goes still again and his hand falls away. You watch him just another few minutes, keep yourself from doin’ anything sappy and stupid, keep yourself from taking his hand again, keep yourself—

Just—keep yourself. 

And then you go.

You don’t go to see him too much after that first time; disregarding in entirety what you want, there’s still a war going on down on Arenin and you got business to do.  You leave him alone and come see him when he asks for you, but no more than that.  He needs rest.  He needs rest without you hanging around staring at him, making sure he’s not going to break (you forgot how young he is, how life hasn’t scarred him up or made him tough yet—you forget that fact that half your faithful children die in the first ten sweeps on board your fleet, that the fact of your regard for him doesn’t make him invulnerable.  He could die.  He could still fucking  _die._ )

Goddamn messiah-blighted fucking  _quadrants_ , you  _forgot_  about this.  You remembered the softness, the want, the urge to hold him and have him every moment and in every way.  You remembered those things all together for the first time in for-fucking-ever as you hurt him, and as he let you.  But you forgot the caring, the worry, the fear.  It’s been so long, so long since you worried, since you feared.  What did you ever have to fear?  Who did you have to fear for?  Always you cared for your own church, sure, but for all you try to keep your few purple-blooded brothers and sisters whole and fighting and growing into the church, but if they die, then they go on to the carnival and you give thanks for that as well.  If he died…

You stop, still, and realize your breath is coming faster, your eyes more red, your chest is turning over a rumbling snarl.  You cannot motherfucking have with that thought.  You  _cannot be thinking it_. 

  You need to stop thinking about this.  And what’s a better way to not think about it than to pump pure don’t-give-a-fuck straight into your brain?  You have been doing a fair load of torture and inquisition and execution and training and not much of your other shitty-ass duties; you have a mountain of papers you could paper your block with, fuckin’ huge as it is. Problem being there ain’t one of your faithful as you know of who could do this for you, and you sure as fuck ain’t hiring a lowblood to do it.  This is church business.

About a hundred or more forms in, you give up, pull some chopped-off horns out of your sylladex, and start at carving them.  Got some little curly ones you can use as earrings, you figure, if you get some of the scratches and cracks worked out of them—

Your husktop starts screaming at you. 

 _Message Incoming!_    It scrolls, over and over again in big letters. _Message Incoming! Priority: )(IG)(-------EST_

Oh.

Can she not leave you alone for a single fucking sweep?  You roll your eyes, and then drop the papers you were signing and the horn you were whittling back on the desk and pound the button to accept the call.  Meenah’s face flickers up on your big screen, and you give her a look like  _so tired of your bullshit._   She don’t look impressed.

“This ship be way bigger than I figured,” is the first thing she says to you.  “It’s the glubbin’ _sufferists_  again, be all stirred up like sharks scentin’ blood.  Dunno what’s got ‘em so riled—”

“They come back every couple handful of sweeps,” you point out, and she huffs out a sigh.  “Workin’ yourshellf up over nothin’, Meenah.  Clam the fuck down.”

“ _Shellf_!” She giggles and then catches herself and forces a frown again.  She looks happier, though.  Smile keeps on twitchin’ through her glower.  “…Ain’t like you to not go all the wave with this, clownfish.  Gettin’ all complaicent, you used to alwaves be sniffin’ out some heresea or other—”

“I know the  _heresy_  of the sufferists,” you growl.  “Know it  _fully motherfucking well,_ don’t I?  Shit returns and I crush it.  SHIT RETURNS AND I MOTHERFUCKING SQUASH IT UNDER THE CHURCH’S MOTHERFUCKIN HEEL.  But here it always comes, like a bad miracle.  So I’ll  _squash it again._ ”  You have to take a breath; pusher is throbbin’, pan achin’.  You don’t speak again until it’s locked up where you’re holding it, where you’re the helm of your own anger. “… _that’s an_ old _rage_ ,” you finish, quiet and calm as the depths of the sea.  “Can’t let it run me in this regard.   _Can’t let it own my motherfuckin’ pan._   I know when anger is a thing I ought, Meenah.”

She sighs and lets up on you on that score.  There’s a hint of her age in her eyes now; she does look sometimes like her own proper age.   _Girl does look so tired and worn._

“…so,” she says finally, “…how’s your little lovergrub?  You cave-robber you.”

You flip her off and she laughs a little—you can’t help but do too.  “Better,” you say, all the more you can say for as he is now.  “…Ain’t sleeping too good, the idiot, keeps him all broken up and not healing.  And he’s got some extra fuckery as made this extra motherfuckin’ weird for him.”  You frown.  “…they fucked him,” you say, and she purses up her lips, draws her brows down low over her eyes.  “I…find it less easy.  Being chill to think about that.”

“Of course you do,” she groans, “—you glubbin’  _moron_ , you all sailin’ that like it’s a surprise!  I could have atolld you,  _when some freak fucks your matesprit, you won’t be happy aboat it._ ”  She throws up her hands.  “…only you, Kurlz.  You shella dumb swimtimes.  So he’s maybe kinda fucked up in the pan after all that?”  She  _hmmms_.  You think on how Gamzee  seems to need to cling to your hand to get to sleep right, how desperate and needing his eyes seem when they’re fixed on you, and you have to nod. 

“Not as worse as it can be,” you point out.  “…he’s makin’ due.  Just not great.”

“Might try him out as a moray-eel,” says Meenah, and types something.  It pops up on your screen, “ _CarcinoGeneticist_ ”.  A chat handle.  “Patch ‘em through at each other.  He ain’t got a palemate already?”

Oh, well  _interesting._   You been thinking on that, slow and back of your pan, for a long while.  “Nah, I’m all he’s got, so far as I know.”

“Oh, so presh, anglerfish caught a little minnow all his very own,” she coos at you, and you flip her off.  “Pretty shore diamond’s the quadrant nubby be anglin’ for.  If he’s for somethin’ flush, you can send him back to me and I’ll all beach the shit out of him until he gets that idea out his pan.  Way he worries, though…”she holds up a fist and paps two fingers against it, wiggling her eyebrows.  “We’ll make it happen.  Gonna get some diamonds all pourin’ out all over this shit.”  Her fingers go from papping her fist to stroking it, all filthy-like.

“Watch it with that shit,” you complain, but you’re laughing.  “—be all motherfuckin’ disgraceful, the empress makin’ signs like a wriggler whose lusus never taught better.”

“Clownfish, I  _invented_  that one!” she laughs at you, and flips her hair out of her face, fucking queen as she is.  “I gotta get gone.  You take care of that shit then, get back to me.”

“Yeah,  _shoooooore_.”  You make the joke too obvious and she giggles anyway, and the screen goes black.

You think maybe she’s headed back down into diamonds for you again, and you’d be mad about that if you weren’t so fucking  _stressed_  right now the thought of somebody to tell you to hush up and sit your ass back down sounds totally motherfucking miraculous.  If she calls you again in the next couple of nights she’s  _definitely_  swinging pale for you.  You lay down a private bet with yourself of a couple of million caegar, because you can, and haul yourself with a groan back to the task at hand.  (Nobody ever told you the service of the messiahs needed so much fucking _busy-work_ ).

(Two nights later Meenah calls you again, and you mentally hand over a couple of million caegar to yourself and laugh at her for bein’ a worrying old sap.)

You haven’t heard from her again in a while, the night you finally get out of your swamp of backlog and back into your throne where you motherfuckin’ belong.  Seat feels cold and un-sat-in.  You drop yourself down in it, groan at the painted ceiling (you gotta get some more paint some time, you been neglecting to collect from those as you've tortured and your stores are  _hella_ low) and then yell down the big hall, “ _IF THERE’S ANYBODY OUT THERE AS WAS WAITING TO SEE ME, GO FUCK OFF AND GET ‘EM_!”

You hear footsteps as someone fucks off to get them, and settle back in your throne with a yawn, to wait.

You got a lot of shit to address.  People come in with ship repairs, with the note one of your helmsmen has offed it and had to be replaced by  _two_  rusties instead—substandard parts, fuck, you’re having a word with Meenah about your goddamn budget—some of the kids were too drunk the last saints’ day and lynched someone's tealblood moirail for daring to be on the ship.  You wouldn’t normally be too torn up about that, but your little sister is now without palemate and she is fucked up.  You have to deal with that shitstorm; a whipping for those as would kill the quadrantmates of one of their own. Then you deal with some trumped-up big-for-his-fins indigo who wants clearance through space currently occupied by church fleet.  You deal with a whole host of little grievances, give most of them leave to do combat to decide the argument, and turn down some little seven-sweep kid who wants to go straight to laughsassin training.  You rule.

Ruling is not as fun as you figured it would be when you dreamed about it as a wriggler, for all it’s got its high points, and you are most motherfucking grateful when the flow of petitioners starts to slack off a little.  You slouch in your throne and knock down wicked elixir, and finally, with one last slam of the big double doors, everything is still and silent.

You slouch back in your throne, stare up at the ceiling, and think about painting.  It’s never old, watching the lights from the lamps flicker over the painted colors on the walls and ceiling.  You kind of space out and lose track of the time when you have the chance.  Look at that shit.  There’s a couple of corners that would be kind of hard to reach, but you want to get some color in those too…you’ve got one or two you’ve bled who have had good painting blood—

The door creaks again, and you open your eyes with a bit of a start.  It’s been…how long since you started nightdreaming?  (Or really dreaming, did you just fucking  _fall asleep_  in your own throne room?  Fuck, maybe you are getting old.) You figured you were done for the night—fuck, it’s morning already and it’s been hours since someone showed up, who waited this long to come and—

…oh.

It’s Gamzee. 

He’s bandaged and battered up and he stands at your door and shifts foot to foot and stares at the ground like he doesn’t know what he should do next.  His eyes can’t fix on you and his hands shake.  

“Gamzee,” you say, for want of something better, and he ducks his head.  He’s wearing his baggy pants, bandages over his bare chest and down his skinny arms, he’s bare-faced and holds himself off one leg with a wince.  You’re used to that, to trolls avoiding pain—but not him.  When he would wince before he would lean into it until you yelled at him to stop, to remember how pissed you’ll be if he breaks himself.

“I,” he says, and closes his mouth again.  He’s barely been on his feet since you went and got him back; his legs look unsteady, his face is uncommon tired. 

“Gonna need to come a little closer than that,” you prompt him, and he closes his mouth again and comes limping up, slow, strangely wary.  He pauses again in front of your throne; you hold out a hand and he slumps all over and comes to you, lets you pull him up into your arms. 

“… _fuckin’ daymares,_ ” he mumbles, and you find yourself missing the days when he didn’t sound ashamed to admit something like that.  You make the first sound as wants to come out—it’s a clicking, crooning little noise, one you haven’t ever realized you could do for all of the hundreds of sweeps you been alive.  He returns it and presses up against you.

“ _Gotta learn to let these things go_ ,” you say into his hair, and rub a hand over the back of his neck where his skin is soft and unscarred. He takes a shuddering breath and lets it out again.  “… _that’s just how we are, kid, we’re trolls.  No limit to the cruelties we’ll do to each other if we ain’t got something to keep us in line._ ”

“I didn’t like it,” he says instead of answering, and he holds on to you.  “—didn’t feel so good when they did it, I mean—pain didn’t take me like…like it did the others, I was still—but—”

“…’course it didn’t.” You growl a little and he flinches.  You’d forgotten the days he used to do that—it’s like a step back, he’s still so much bigger but it’s like you’re holding him from back sweeps ago, when he was young and he winced away from you when you growled, afraid he displeased you. 

“… _of course it didn’t fucking feel good_ ,” you tell him again, quieter, and drag your claws over his scalp, trying to coax him gentle.  He’s still shaking and pressed up desperately close against you, and you care, you fucking  _care_ , gods and messiahs do you care for him.  “…be surprised if it did, wriggler, come on.” 

He laughs a bit, a sad little noise.  You still have some prisoners left, don’t you?  You’re going to go and tear someone’s horns off for this, for  _all of this_ , you’re going to… _not_.  Kill someone.  No matter how much they beg for it.

“That what you came here to say?”  You prompt him, and he bites his lip and frowns at his knees.  “Turn you off a bit from pain, ain’t a bit of shame to that, no shame to anything like, brother—”

“But what if I can’t ever feel it like that again?!”

You weren’t expecting him to come out with a reason so hard and fast; it takes you a second to realize what he even said, and then you close your eyes, really slow, as the meaning of that hits you.  Fuck.   _Fuck_.  And he thinks of you that you wouldn’t want him if he couldn’t enjoy the pain you gave him ,  _and he thinks of you_  that you would leave him for something so small?

“ _Hurt me_ ,” Gamzee says into your shoulder, and he shudders all over.  You are brought hard down into your own mind again, into your own throbbing pusher.  Fuck this, fuck him for working himself so deep inside you, fuck the way your insides ache at seeing him so hopelessly scared.  “—hurt me. Just—motherfuckin’—”

“You sure?”  It sits uneasy in you, the shaky, desperate way he says it, it  _rots there in your pan and pusher_ , it makes you squeeze him tight and grind your fangs.  “ _Absolutely fuckin’ sure_ , little one, you think long and hard over this.”

“I—” his voice catches on it, shakes with uncertainty.  Yeah, you thought as much.  “…do  _you_ want…?”

“What I  _want—_!”  You start, loud and frustrated and sharp, and he flinches from your voice again.  You force yourself to lower it again, soften yourself.  You are his lord, king, priest and you should by rights be less gentle with him, but he’s not just your brother he’s your flushmate, and you are bound up in him.  “…what I want, it doesn’t fucking signify, little one.  I been sweeps without, I could wait sweeps more if you ain’t up for it.”

He stares at you, and you remember like a picture in front of your eyes…the way he looked at you that first night you told him you would be flushed for him if he would give the same back.  Like he’s going to cry, or like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. 

“I,” he says, very very softly.  “…then…” and he leans up, presses himself against you.  “…then, just.  Just a little…?  Please, I motherfuckin’ swear, I do, I…I do want—just, just, like, just show me what it was like before, I can’t— _fucking_ — _REMEMBER_ —!”

He’s angry, sudden and bitter, and you hold onto him as he growls and makes fists in the front of your shirt. When he’s gone still again, you lean down and tilt his face up to kiss him.  He whimpers when you bite his lip, hard enough you know it stings, but for all that he doesn’t push away. It soothes his broken little sounds when you run your tongue over the spot you bit, and he forces himself slack by inches as you run your claws up and down his back, taking careful catalogue of his bruises and his wounds, watching his face.  He colors under your scrutiny. He bites his lip and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Keep your eyes on me,” you tell him, as soft as you can. “Keep me in your sights, wriggler, _know me_  for the one as causing you this. No fucking other.”

His breath catches, and his eyes open. He can’t quite look at your face, but he watches your chest, your throat, your mouth, eyes flickering up and down you as you touch him.

“That’s good,” you tell him, and he soaks that in, as you wind his hair in your fingers and tug a little, just enough to twinge.  “Motherfuckin’ good to me, wriggler, you always have been.”

“ _Ah_ ,” he says, shaky, and shivers.  “Ah—hhh—I-I…” He stops and takes a deep breath and then another when you drag your claws down the lines of his hips, all thin, soft skin. His eyes are watering when he looks up at you, his eyes are pure purple and you never thought to notice that they were clouding colored through the grey. You are adrift in pity.  You are motherfucking _struck._

You pull him right up close and wrap him up in your arms, and he jumps and then grabs you back and clings to you so hard.  “ _Hey,_ ” he says into your shoulder, and you stroke his hair, his back, run your claws over his scalp and stroke the soft tips of his ears.  Every few seconds you touch him soft and sweet you give him a little jolt of pain, and he’s slowly thawing, he’s hesitating but he’s rubbing up against you--slow, halting, chirping and crooning in the back of his throat.

“More?”  You ask, half a laugh, when he lets out a loudest sound so far.  He jumps--goes purple. “Good motherfuckin’  _reminder_  so far?”

He worries his lip some more.  His face is so open even with his paint; without it, it’s painful to watch, it’s  _terrible_ , it’s like watching a wriggler trying to bluff like he’s not about to cry.

“ _Please,_ ” he says, finally, and you try not to frown at him, doubt his word. He’ll tell you, when he’s getting too much.  He’ll tell you. You trust him with that much. “Yeah. I. Try…do more…?”

Hm. You lean down and pull him up, and you taste his pulse through the softness under his jaw—it makes him chirp again, that instinctive, helpless little sound. You find the spot, the exact spot, sweeps ago, where you hurt him on purpose for the first time. You think maybe you can find the shape of the barest hint of scar where your teeth sank into his flesh, where you brought him to shaking and gasping.

You sink your teeth into his shoulder and he holds on to you so hard it even almost hurts and lets out a long, long, throbbing sound in the back of his throat.  His muscles are all twitching and shivering all over, his hands knead at the light armor plates on your clothes. “ _Little one_ ,” you find yourself saying, purple blood on your lips, and kiss and suck and nip at his throat, his sharp collarbones, his ears, his jaw.  “— _Little one,_ Gamzee _, Gamzee, ain’t ever letting you go away like that again, they’ll pay for what got done to you, saw you all tryin’ to protect your motherfuckin’ family, you’re a credit, little one you’re a fucking treasure—_ ”

“ _God_ ,” he whimpers, and squirms in your lap, pressing close to you. They could hurt him, they could fuck him, but they never had this, they never lifted him up like you can.  “ _No, I—I, they, they stopped, they just, when they figured out, that, that, that I couldn’t get hurt by them motherfuckin’ hurting me they took the others, they,_ ahh _, they hurt them instead,_ w-why couldn’t they have just have hurt me, why _…_ ” he jerks up toward you and catches your mouth with his; you feel his tongue flick over your teeth, taking the taste of his blood.  His breath hitches into yours in soft little sobs. “—I made it  _worse_  for them,” he finishes, wretched, and shudders. “...I fucked up, I fucked up...”

You reach out; hold his face in both hands.  Turn his face up towards you and kiss him again, but gentle this time.  He is all shudder and need, he wants to make it fast and hungry, but you keep him slow and steady and soft. You dare to dig claws at the back of his neck, and he gasps.

“They would have hurt you  _all_  anyway,” you say, and you make it low and sharp and firm like an order.  “You couldn’t take it all on you.  Fuck knows I would do for you if it was a thing that any troll could do, but that ain’t a power we have.”

He sniffs. You hope he ain’t crying, you can’t even fucking deal with the crying.

“…You’ll do better next time,” you tell him, and forget about touching him for now. He is small and fleeting-fragile, and you wrap him up and hold him instead.  “…you’ll heal, it’ll gentle. I know. It fades.”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, and butts his head against your shoulder with a tired little sigh.

You’re both silent for a long while, you just holding on to him, him just being held. Then he sighs again, just barely, and you feel him shift and curl a little in on himself.

“…what’s rattling around your pan now?” You poke at his ass and then get a big handful and squeeze until he groans and can’t pretend he doesn’t hear you anymore.  “Hey.  Asked you a question, wriggler.”

“…I don’t miss bein’ a stupid kid,” he mutters, and he holds himself, wraps his arms around his skinny chest and slumps.  “…don’t miss bein’ high and lonely as fuck, or, like, I mean, I miss my friends, but—”

 “Get to the point,” you prompt him, and tug on one ear. He chirps and then clears his throat.

“…don’t miss all that,” he says again, and turns his face against you, so his voice is muffled. “… _but I miss not bein’ scared._ ”

The door slams open.

Gamzee jumps about a mile and whips around so fast he almost hits you in the face with his horns, and lo and glory be, the empress herself is come, swaying her way down the throne room in a cloud of hair and gold and fuchsia stone.  Gamzee glances back up at you, eyes huge—you wrap your arm around him, all shielding him and close and tight, and he relaxes just a little bit.

“Aw, look at what I gone and did,” she coos, and grins at you.  “Went and interrupted some makeouts!  Caught yourself a tasty little bit of bait, didn’t you you old anglerfish?”

“Hey, Meenah,” you rumble, and your voice is all growling and deep trying not to laugh at how Gamzee is staring.  You still have your hand on his ass and you know she notices.  You squeeze—he squeaks a little and goes purple up to his ears.  “You jealous?”

“Oh, shell yeah,” she says at you, sarcastic, and then scoffs.  “—no of course I don’t want your glubbin’ matesprit you bass, I don’t fuck clowns.”

“Do so,” you point out, and she purses up her lips and glubs through them at you. 

“Made you take your makeup off though.”

You recall, for all it was so long ago; she laughed at how you blushed, even after fifty sweeps, to be seen without your paint.  Gamzee makes a really quiet noise and when you look down at him he’s squirming a little bit, eyes flicking from her to you and face all purple.  You grin at his nerves and his sudden interest (and also because he has stopped bein’ all small and sad and quiet.  Life’s easier when he ain’t small and sad and quiet.  That’s not how he’s meant to be).

“…c’mere,” you say to Meenah, and she raises an eyebrow at you and then catches sight of the way you flick your eyes down to Gamzee and back up at her and then grin.  She grins back, suddenly amused as well, and sways her way up to you, puttin’ it all in her hips.  Gamzee presses back against you like a little fish in front of a real big shark and you wrap that arm around him a little lower, so your hand hovers low on his stomach and he makes breathless little noises.  She leans over him, hand on either arm of your throne, and you get a handful of her hair and tug her in, almost gentle, to kiss her.

Gamzee, who’s left sitting in your lap with a face of her rumble spheres, makes a noise like a squeakbeast as just got stepped on.  She giggles into your mouth and you chew on her lip until she pulls off again, leaving you to lick up the tyrian she’s left behind.  She’s got mischief in her eyes too, at the way your descendant freezes and blushes between the two of you.  You wouldn’t have her there as you fuck him—that’s between you and him, him and you and she ain’t even a quadrant, not really.  Too much between you, too much history.  But it’s still funny as hell to watch the wrigglers get an eyeful of the imperial rumble spheres for the first time.  He looks like he been hit hard in the face.

“Nice seein’ you too,” you say, lazy.  “You need somefin’?”

“ _Fin_ ,” she giggles, and then starts to give the idea thought, considering.  “Mmmmm, well,” she says, still leaning in close enough Gamzee’s leaning way back and twitching all nervous.  “…I was gonna get you in trouble because you been reefing all your papers until way late and some of them you ain’t efin turned in, and all my keyboard-fondlin’ nerd-ass beaches been complainin’ aboat you when they frygure I can’t hear them.  But basically you got imperial duty to get me mad drunk so I forget about that, catfish?”

You frown.  “Catfish?”

She rolls her eyes at you.  “ _Capisce_ ,” she corrects.  “Come on, you makin’ me hook bad.”

Gamzee lets out a tiny huff of a laugh and then covers his mouth and shrinks when Meenah looks down at him.  She grins.

“You like my jokes, doncha?  Loverbuoy.”

“I,” starts Gamzee, and then actually stutters silent, purple all the way up from his shoulders to the tips of his ears.  You haven’t ever seen him so tongue-tied, not since he met you for the first time.  You would be a little jealous—if his frond hadn’t snaked back to find yours and his fingers weren’t squeezing yours for comfort.  Precious little wriggler.  You squeeze back and then sneak your other hand up under him and pinch his ass and he squeaks and jumps.  “I, yeah, uh.  Yes!”  He stops for a second, frozen up.  It occurs to you, all sudden-like, that this is the first time someone has known about him and you.  And his empress, none less, and she all standing there watching and making cracks about ‘lover-buoy’.  She’s wigglin’ her eyebrows at him.  You roll your eyes.

“Your imperious condescension,” you prompt, amused, and he nods and repeats it after you gratefully.  Meenah croons and ruffles up his hair. 

“Impearlious Clamdesandscion,” she corrects, and you roll your eyes again and try not to give her the satisfaction of laughing.

“Drinks then?”  You push yourself up and whoa, what a mystery, how did you get a skinny, squirmy body in your arms with one of your hands on its ass?  Miraculous.  “You want a drink, little—you want a drink?”

He hesitates, then says “…sure?”  like he’s not sure that’s what he was supposed to say.  Then, a little quieter, “…can you, uh.  Can you motherfuckin’ put me back on the floor and all.  Please.”

Aw, kid’s shy.  Cutest shit.  You got it for a fact he likes it when you pick him up normally, but Meenah is watchin’ you and giggling non-stop and yeah, you kinda get why he wants to be a little less pity-soft and a little more badass when she’s around.  You sigh big and heavy and steal a kiss while you got him up with you, swat his ass again and slide him down.  He’s still all purple and oh, yeah, he’s not wearing a shirt.  Or his paint.  Kind of like seeing him naked, for sure.  You approve the fuck out of that, even if it makes you want to spend a day in easing him back into being comfortable with you more than you particularly want to go and get a drink.

“Just a one or two, Meenah,” you say, eyes fixed on his skinny, back, the muscles moving under his skin.  “…I got… _things_  to do today.”

She catches where your eyes are fixed and she snorts and turns her back.  “Yeah yeah yeah,” she says, and waves you off as she sways off towards the door.  “You’ll get your chance to polish one off, come on.  I just gotta go and get my nubby li’l barnacle.  He needs to go with and loose himself up, he ain’t ever had a drink I sean.  Karcrabby!”  She busts your door open like it ain’t hundreds of sweeps old and a church relic of first order.  That little thread of pitch as is always there, even when you’re almost pale, flares up a bit.  “We’re headed out to get a drink and  _you_ are comin’ too!”

There’s a short little troll outside the door, decked up in threshecutioner uniform and looking tense and strung-tight as choke-wire.  He leans back as you come out behind Meenah—he’s so fuckin’ tiny, all small as Gamzee used to be or smaller, even though he must be about the kid’s age.  His horns are…nubby.  His face is square and set.  His eyes are so, so familiar.

“Karkat!”

Gamzee goes past you at speed you hadn’t figured he had right now, and plows the threshecutioner right off his feet.  He yells in startlement, screams invectives of a salty sort indeed, and then all of a sudden he stops and goes.  “—wait, hold the fuck up, just— _uff_ —are— _Gamzee_?!”

“Best friend!”  Gamzee returns, and hugs him tight, squeezing him and nuzzling at his hair like he’s a wriggler’s comfort toy.  “Hey!  Oh my god, ain’t this the happiest motherfuckingest miracle you ever did saw, holy shit!”

“It is  _not_  a—” little Karkat starts, and then all of a sudden he glances up over Gamzee’s shoulder and sees you staring at him, still as silent space and frozen where you stand.  “…it…” he continues, much slower, all careful suddenly and cautious.  “…sure.  Fine, whatever the fuck you want to call it, you pan-leak.”  He slumps and lets Gamzee make excited noises and spin around with him, babbling about miracles and thanks and best friends and you turn to Meenah, really slow and quiet.

“…can I  _talk_  at you for a second?”  You ask, polite and smooth as sea lords in court, and you walk back through the door and close it behind the two of you.

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara and you are freaking the fuck out. 

Karkat is even littler than you remember seeing him, the few times you did see him before you both headed off into space.  Or maybe you’ve gotten bigger, you don’t give a fuck, he’s just so tiny and warm and you gone and missed him something fierce while you all got stars and planets between the two of you.  You hug him until he starts wheezing and slapping at your shoulder, then you put your hands under his arms, hold him out away from you and look him over.

He dangles at the end of your arms like an angry meowbeast and gawps at you about like you’re lookin’ at him.  He’s got some scars now as he didn’t have when last you saw him, just like you must for him.  He’s got hair clipped short up the back and two gold earrings.  He’s got eyes that burn like coals and a missing tooth at the corner of his frown. 

“Holy  _shit_ , you got fucking  _enormous_ ,” he says, and leans all awkward to look down at the hand you got on him.  You can wrap your fingers all round the side of his thorax now, your long hands have all up and gotten longer.  “Fucking hell.”

“Best  _friend_ ,” you say again, and hug him some more. 

“Why aren’t you—ngh—” he coughs in your ear and squirms and you loosen your grip again a little bit.  “…why aren’t you wearing your paint?  I thought on this ship for sure you’d be wearing—”

You drop him.  He squalls, but turns the drop into a roll as you spin around and feel yourself go all hot right up to the tips of your horns.  You’d forgot, up and totally lost track, you’re so used to wearing your paint all the time you didn’t realize you hadn’t got it on now and oh shit, oh shit oh shit he just saw you  _naked,_  fuck!

“What the actual  _hell_?”  He starts, but then you hear a noise from behind you and you turn back and realize all of a sudden that Kurloz and the empress are gone.  From behind the throne room door, there are muffled raised voices, like people yelling but trying to do it quietly.  He comes up beside you; you sort of shuffle a little bit sideways to him so he can’t see your bare face.

“ _…JUST LIKE BEFORE!”_ Kurloz is yelling, and then he seems to get it back under control; his voice drops low again.   _“…across the entire empire… about this?  Meenah—_ ”

She says something you can’t hear.  Karkat looks uneasy, twisting his fingers together and shifting from foot to foot.  Makes you remember how just a bit ago you were in that place too, not sure—

Reminds you all of a sudden of how your back and your legs keep aching, of how late in morning it is, of how you pulled yourself out of the slime because every time you sink under you go back to that black little room and hot hands on your face, forcing you to look, to  _watch—_

“Gamzee?”

You jump. Karkat is looking at you like he’s just asked you something, and you’ve been far away.  Your hands are all shaking, your legs too, fuck—

“Sorry,” you say, and grin at him and then remember—turn your face away, cover your mouth with your hand, can’t meet his gaze.  “…I spaced out.”

He’s looking at you with a weird, sharp look, and you shrink a little bit.  You’re not in that big, hazy space in your head anymore, that sopor-green place where you just wanted to please everyone, but you don’t want to disappoint Karkat.  You always held him somewhere high up in your head, he knew what was up, he talked to you when you trolled him, he yelled at you to eat and sleep and stop sitting around staring at the ocean all night. “That wasn’t ‘spaced out’,” he says, and you flinch a little.  He’s squinting at you in the dark corridor, frowning even harder than normal, trying to get a look at your face.  You tilt your head so your hair falls in your face and hunch up your shoulders, then wince when your back hurts (the wrong kind of hurt, the worst kind of hurt).  “…Gamzee.  Are you, uh…are you okay, man?”

Fuck fuck fuck.

“I’m fine!” you say, but it comes out loud and fast and too bright and he jumps back away from you—you cover your face up again and turn away from him and he follows, reaching out a hand to grab your arm.  Inside, they’re arguing about something again—your head is spinning, why can’t you just sit with Kurloz again he makes you feel small and safe he makes you feel better and you don’t want Karkat to know you fucked up, god, you got them hurt so bad, you got your brothers and sisters  _killed_ —

“Gamzee— _Gamzee_ , whoa, you need to, uh—you need to, like, sit down or something—fuck, man, what’s going on with you?  You look like shit.”

A laugh comes bubbling up out of you, a high, tight noise that fucking  _hurts_  when it tears out of you, like it’s slicing you open.  Karkat looks scared, fucking  _scared_  of you, and your left knee, your knee they twisted kneeling on your legs, forcing them open, your leg your fucking  _leg_ —

You drop down to the ground as your leg goes out from under you and you  _howl_  laughing.  You hear your name somewhere far away but it’s too funny  _what’s going on with you you look like shit, you clown-worshipping freak go on scream for your_ owner _again keep on praying you piece of shit they’ll never find you this is where you’re going to die stop laughing_ stop laughing we’ll kill you _—_

Someone’s hand is on your face, running over your skin over and over and fucking over again, someone’s fingers are tracing over the edges of your oculars and your snarling mouth, and you think it must be your matesprit, ain’t a single other person who touches you so tender, but their skin is so  _warm..._

“What the  _fuck_ is going on out here?”  Goes a voice far away, and someone cries out, the hand on your face jerks away.  Everything is too much without that warmth to feel, to all wrap your pan around and cling on to, and you cry  out like a wriggler lost in the dark and grope blind for where it went, trying to breathe, it’s so dark—

The warm hands come back and touch you again and you lunge forwards and find a warm body as well.  There’s that voice in your ear, a little breathless now,  _shhhh, shooshhhh…_  and then, past you,  _“—something—fell over all of a sudden, don’t know what he—the fuck happened—hurting him, okay?  Holy fuck—_ ”

Karkat.  Karkat, this is Karkat, these are Karkat’s hands, this is  _Karkat_  you’re holding on to and Karkat who’s holding on to you and making those tiny soothing sounds at you.  You’re on your knees in the corridor outside the throne room, making terrible little noises, your face is covered in tears and every inch of you is shaking.  The motherfucking empress is there, eyes fixed on your disgrace, not smiling anymore.  And Kurloz is in front of you, one hand huge around Karkat’s wrist, his eyes fixed hard on your face.  You don’t recognize, for a second, what he feels, what’s on his face.

And then you realize, all of a sudden, what you’re seeing.

He’s scared.

You hate to see, can’t bear to think on, and you say something, a garbled whine, “ _No please don’t—_ ” and you reach for him, sobbing all over again, too far gone to keep making words.  He comes forward to you and reaches over Karkat’s shoulder and cups your face in one big, rough hand.  His hand on one cheek and Karkat’s all warm on the right and you finally manage a great, huge, gasp of air.  “ _Don’t, don’t, don’t,_ ‘m okay, please,  _fuck_  don’t l-look at me like—l-like that—”

“Holy shit,” Karkat is breathing, holding on to you tight, “… _holy shit,_ what the fuck—”

“Little one,” says Kurloz, a great, low rumble, and under his paint his face is tight, his eyes are soft and dark.  “You’re out now, you’re safe, and they’re all being paid in full for what they motherfucking dared to do—”

“What?”  Karkat sounds scared now too—he pulls back to look at your face, close between you and Kurloz, and with Kurloz’s hand on your face you can’t look away from them, their faces so close to yours, their eyes on you.  “What are you talking about?  What happened?”  And then he seems to realize who he’s talking to because he jumps and shrinks forward, eyes wide.  Kurloz glances down at him but doesn’t linger, just looks back at you and tucks some of your hair behind one ear, wipes away tears from your cheeks. 

“What is there I can do,” he says, very quiet.  “…what is there I can do to fix this?”

“What the actual taint-pailing fuck,” says Karkat, and you have to laugh—not the high, terrible laugh from last time, but a wet, tiny little noise.  Karkat glances back at your matesprit, then tightens up his mouth and strokes your face again with soft, warm hands and rough fingertips. 

You get yourself up a few minutes later; you’re still shaky and you feel kind of sick and wobbly, but Karkat follows you all the way as high up as he can reach and then hovers, hands raised to grab you again.  Kurloz still has a hand in your hair, running over the round of your skull, around the bases of your horns.  Karkat is looking from you to him and back again, squinting, mouth hanging open.  You give him a watery kind of grin.

“Wow,” you say, kind of breathless, wrung out and tired but so good, so fucking good.  “ _Wow_.  I.  Wow.  Fuck.  Brother, I— _wow._ ” Kurloz tugs your hair just a little—the little sting and the feeling of his big hand on your head help keep you where you are, make you solid, keep you real, and you lean back a little against him and purr.  Karkat sputters.

“Did you just  _shoosh_  him?” The empress giggles, and Karkat goes NO! at the same time as you go _yeeeahhhh_ , all dizzy and giddy.  Everything is still warm where he touched you, Kurloz is holding you tight and solid against him.  “Sure looks like you shooshed him.”

“I—he was—he was freaking out, okay?”  Karkat’s face is going rusty-red, his eyes are real round.  “I couldn’t just—what was I supposed to do, leave him there to cry on the ground?!”

Kurloz chuckles, low as grinding rock against your back, and the hum makes something hot and hungry run up your spine for the first time in a long time.  In the space after the sudden fear and the hurting, everything is warm and good.  “ _Okay,_ ” he says, really quietly _“…that’s cute as all shit, messiahs damn him_.”

“Ain’t he just,” you agree, and as Karkat opens his mouth to start yelling again you step forward and put a hand on his hot face.  “Bro. Ain’t no deal with me if you—if you want to—” (And it’s not, it’s not, you won’t mind, you swear to yourself and your messiahs if this was a one-time thing, you wouldn’t mind.) (You already want his hands on your face again, you already want him to not leave.)  You give up on talking and just look at him, grinning like an idiot, warm and bright inside like sopor but better.

Karkat stares at you for a few seconds, your hand on his face, and he doesn’t shake it off. 

And then he slumps down and reaches up, patting the hand you have on his cheek, leaning into it and you are fucking  _flying_.  You stand there and stare at each other for a long time; Karkat’s mouth quirks up at the corner, the most smile you’ve ever seen on his face, and you beam at him with all your teeth.  And then, finally, there’s a slow, heavy clapping.

The empress is standing there watching you, grinning and clapping and leaning on your ancestor’s hip and you have a moirail.  Kurloz is watching you with a smile on his face and you have a moirail.  Your hand on Karkat’s face is so warm, he’s not yelling any more, you have a motherfucking  _moirail._


	6. Pale as Bones, Pale as Stars

After Karkat takes you for pale, things get…different. Good different! But different. Things are all…weird.

Karkat is given special permission to be on your ship, and he won’t put up with any faithful who want to go after him for being on the church fleet. He’s not been just sitting on his ass as you rose up and up and passed through classes, you learn from him that the empress likes him uncommon well, and she has him under her protection. You come up on him more than once yelling right in a faithful’s face,  _STEP THE FUCK OFF I’M HERE TO TALK TO MY PAN-ADDLED MOIRAIL AND IF YOU THINK YOU CAN STOP ME YOU’VE GOT ANOTHER THING COMING YOU GIANT BULGE-LICKING PURPLE—_

The brother he’s yelling at is looking all about ready to make a fight out of it when you step in and have to all get a little salty with him,  _step off of my palemate bro, or I’ll have to fuck you up, and ain’t neither of us motherfuckin’ wants that_. You have him give you his word he’ll all spread it around, and you know he won’t mind, the family’s always ready to spread around some gossip or other.  _Gamzee Makara’s got a warm-blood palemate_  ought to be a thing they’ll whisper gladly.

  
Then you pull him off back to your block and you get to talking. Lots to talk about.

…lots to talk about that you don’t talk about, because it’s plain for you to see part of why he’s so angry, so tight all up inside him is because he ain’t had nobody to be all gentle-sweet with him, because he ain’t had anybody touch him except with sickle’s edge since he was young enough to cuddle up with his lusus. You learn that as sweet as it is to you for you to feel pain, it’s as sweet to you to gentle him. The things that make you shake, the things that spin and dizzy your pan with fear of pleasure, they make him sigh and melt and purr for you. You can wrap him up in your arms, he’s so small; you think on how it makes you feel care for him, how sweet he looks…makes you wonder if this is how it makes Kurloz feel when he holds on to you. The thought is all sweet and warm as his hand on your face, and it gets you purring every time you hold him.

He’s busy, a lot. You’re a soldier, he’s a soldier. You regret fully, when you see quadrants who can block together and see each other every night, that your own are a soldier and a king, that they have such busy lives their own and that you can’t hardly ever spend a quiet time with them. Makes the times you do get all more miraculous, you guess. Reminds you of all that’s holy about your sweetest quadrants.

Miraculous and holy like how Karkat doesn’t just let you shoosh his angry, he shooshes you back, and it’s not so scary when he’s the one as is being gentle with you. You can try to relax and let him pet your hair, pet your horns—

  
God, wow, if you can just start to relax into it you think you could start all liking the fuck out of hornrubs. It is the most miraculous feeling, scary and big and bright and foggy.

He’s just getting you to finally relax, to stop tensing up every few seconds and just let him touch you, when he lifts your arm and all of a sudden the touching stops.

“Gamzee.”

You roll a little and crack one eye open to look up at Karkat; his eyes are all narrowed and the gentle chill he’s been melting into is harshed and gone all of a sudden. He grabs your arm and stretches it out, sliding up your sleeve, and you’re still weak and slow and don’t think to stop him when he turns it over. The soft insides of your arm are marked up with bruises and scabs and scars; Kurloz’s teeth leaving marks on you in these gorgeous rings all locked together with each other. Karkat’s fingers run over them and you remember getting them and sigh, real quiet, pleased. He pulls his hands away real quick, taking it for a sound of pain.

“…who did this?” He asks, strangled off. “Holy shit, Gamzee—do you have a seriously fucked-up pitchmate or what?!”

“Ain’t got a pitchmate,” you mumble, and try to curl back up around him and go back to sleep. He swats you for it and pulls your arm straight again to stare at your wounds. What’s he even look so upset about? Ain’t like they upset you, and you’re the one as has them.

“Who put these there then?!” He looks seriously off his chill on this, and you start to wake up a little Something seems to hit him; his face goes pale and grey, all that slight trace of red draining away. “—the—listen, Gamzee, that freak—ugh, no, shit—” he mutters something at himself and takes a deep breath; tries again. “…The grand highblood hasn’t been…he was…awfully personal with you, the day we, uh…met each other, and I know you clown freaks are all up in each other’s space, the  _family_  or whatever, but...” He stops, looking at you like he asked a question that you should be answering, but you think back on it and you can’t find the question. He don’t like to talk about Kurloz much. You think the old man’s been putting a little fear of god in him, being as he’s so cheeky to the faithful in their own fleet.

“…what,” you say finally, and he groans.

“He hasn’t been…doing anything… _creepy_  to you, has he?” He asks, and you consider all the soft touches, how right he makes you feel, and shake your head real chill.

“Nothing as I didn’t ask for,” you say.

This doesn’t seem to make him feel better. In fact, his eyes go kind of wide. He does not look cool with this. Actually, he’s…kind of freaking out a little bit, you think—or a lot, actually—okay, what the fuck?

“Bro,” you say, worried, “…you okay?”

“Am  _I_  okay?!” He sounds kind of squeaky. “What do you mean,  _nothing you didn’t ask for_? What the fuck are these?!” He pokes harder than he means at the bites on your arm and you wince and wish he wouldn’t—the way pain takes you, it ain’t at all pale. You’d rather not at this particular moment. “—shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you—I mean—fuck! Answer the question! Who bit you?”

You catch yourself on his name at the last second. “The old man,” you say, chill as fucking chill, and he gapes at you. “Uh, what’s the—grand highblood, yeah. Him.”

“Fucking hell,” he says, and opens and shuts his mouth, tries to make words come out and doesn’t seem to be able. “He—what— _why_?”

 _Why_  is a harder question. You sit and stare at him and try to figure out how to say all as you want to say, and he grows more worried every second, he springs up to his feet and walks back and forth and back and forth and puts his claws through his hair over and over again. His eyes are wide and scared.

“Gamzee, if he’s hurting you—we can get you away from him, I can talk to the empress, I mean—” he looks scared out of his pan by the thought, and your pusher is all tied up in pity for him, that he’d try to do something like that for all he’s so scared. Doesn’t mean you want him to, though, so you reach up and pull him back down with you.

“I am not leaving this fleet,” you tell him, firm as holy law. “And I am not motherfucking leaving this ship. All of me as doesn’t belong to you, or—or any of the others from home, every other tiniest goddamn bit of me is all here and I’m not leaving, you hear?”

“But—”

“Karkat,” you say, as serious as you know how to, and you stroke his precious worried face with your roughed-up fingers and settle him down in front of you, make his shaking hands be still. “He  _is_  hurting me, okay? Doing shit full and torturous, okay, he does hurt me and he did put those there—” you get off track a second, remembering how clean and sharp he is with his knives and his needles, how smooth it is when he hurts you. Makes your pusher flip over. “—whenever we can both get a time alone, he knows so many ways to hurt a troll, all that knowledge, shit is motherfuckin’ miraculous—” and then you see him breathing fast and shallow and his face all twisted up in horror and you realize this is a story that you ain’t telling in the right way at all. “…Karkat.” You say it to him again, until he seems to hear, “—Karkat,  _Karkat,_ listen at me, okay? Bro, I ain’t…completely squared with you.”

“…then fucking  _square with me_  already!” He’s still all wide-eyed, his hands twitch for his sickles when he’s in upset, as yours for your clubs. “Make me understand! Make me understand this, Gamzee, I’m— _basically_  freaking the fuck out!”

So you settle down, you take a deep breath…and you tell him.

He stares at you the whole time as you tell him how you figured out when you were a wriggler how your body took pain and turned it into something great and good and holy and made all your insides sing. How you couldn’t quite hurt yourself enough, not ever, how you always needed more and how your matesprit heard you when you pleaded him to help you in that, how he deigned to turn his sweeps and sweeps of pain-making on you and take you somewhere high and beautiful.

“Never found something he could do that I would take and ask for more of,” you tell him, and you take his hands and hope to all fuck he can see that what you tell him is the whole and complete truth. “He makes me— _so fucking happy_ , best friend, you cannot even contemplate.”

Karkat takes a deep breath, starts to make a sound, lets it out in a big huff of air instead. You wait, nerves all tight, guts hot and heavy with fear.

“Doesn’t always hurt me,” you add, and your voice comes out tiny and timid in the quiet. “…he’s gentle sometimes, but he knows that…that when he does that it freaks the fuck out of me, feels good but it just takes me the fuck  _apart_ , so he doesn’t do it too much—”

“Please stop saying words right now,” says Karkat, very quiet and fast, and reaches out with his eyes still shut to pat at your face. “Shh. I’m. Absorbing. Okay? Just, shut your gaping face gash for a minute and let me process this.”

You shut up and let him process. He takes your arm and looks at those bite marks again, and when he presses a little too hard this time he watches your little squirms and sees how you chew your lip, keep in the sounds you want to make. He looks again at those studs in your ears, the golden rods that go through the marrow of your horns, the scars on your skin and the ten long lines of raw skin running right up your back to the nape of your neck.

“…you…you really…you  _enjoy_  it?” He asks finally, and you nod your head. “Not just tolerate it, you…”

“I love it,” you say, fervent as a prayer. “And he loves to hurt, how miraculous can it all get that we’d be so inclined, brother? How fucking right is that?”

“It’s...” he starts, and opens and shuts his mouth some more (never seen your nubbiest and shoutiest of brothers so lost for speech as he has all been tonight, he’s downright tied up in knots). “…I’m…glad you found somebody who could give you what you were…looking for.”

“Yeah dog,” you sigh, and you touch the bites on your arm and smile at them like a quadrant sign, like a precious gift. “miracles. True. Motherfucking. Serendipitous. Miracles.”

“…right.” He sighs a little, comes forward and takes your face in both hands to kiss you soft and pale and gentle, and then bumps your foreheads together. His warmth is a little burning firebrand against you, all cupped up in the palm of your hands like fire. “I’m glad you told me. Fucking pale for you.”

“Pale as bones, bro,” you tell him, and kiss his forehead.

“Pale as stars,” he tells you back, and the way it makes him blush to say that makes you gather him up, flailing arms and angry yells and all. You pull him down in the pile to run your hands through his hair, give him those touches as he never did get, gentle him, and he presses his hot hands over your bruises and your scars and doesn’t say a word.

  
\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara and now that your moirail is gone back to his ship on the imperial fleet—three days gone, and you do miss him so, more than you would have fucking credited—and you all healed up, you’re back in the training rooms in the middle of daytime, clubs out and getting back in your game. 

You didn’t figure for how weak you’d all gotten, but you find as you work that you are truly a wreck.  All the dizzy and the weakness as you’d finally trained out of yourself after the sopor has come back, and your legs betray you when you try for the spinning step of a subjugglator in full battle.  Your body soaks in sweat, your breath comes short. 

Distracting you also is your nook as it throbs,  all used to working around a fullness and unyielding sting of almost-pain inside you—you weren’t to take Kurloz’s toys with you on your mission and you haven’t been with him long enough since your rescue for him to replace what was yours.  You feel empty,  _real_  fucking empty, missing the ache and stretch.  Your bulge twinges in you too, all reminding in terms no way uncertain that you haven’t gotten yourself good and fucked for all of weeks—not the good kind of fucked, anyway. 

The bad kind of fucked, you got your experience with—those heathen shitstains couldn’t hardly touch the sides of you, you so much bigger than them and having taken your matesprit’s toy out so short a while ago.  You figure maybe you should be upset they fucked you anyway, at least by how Kurloz hates it, hates to think on it and on the scars of their claws on your thighs, but you can’t find it in you.  Won’t come.  (He tightens up when he remembers they fucked you—you tighten up when you remember they hurt you.  Ain’t a thing if they fucked you.  You never got near getting off then.)

(You only came close to getting off when they hurt you, and that was when you hated yourself and that was when you wanted pain to stop being so good and stop being so bad both at once and you  _hated_  it.) 

It was such a relief, so great, when he bit down on your flesh and you all cocooned up in the scent of his want and his skin so cool and familiar.  The pain was right again.  The pain was the right kind, and you didn’t have to be guilty or feel like a freak, a fuck-up, to moan and rub up on him for hurting.  It had been so good, and then you got interrupted, and for all you love Karkat with your whole and entire diamond, for all you carry the empress in a great deal of awe…you haven’t gotten your time to be with him since.

You really need a good fuck.

\--

That thought is very much stuck in your brain, and remains there as you wander back towards your block through the silent ship.  You never get back to your ‘coon at reasonable times—you got kind of a reputation, you hear, for all spending the sleeping times up and about and the times when everyone is up sleeping.  You get up for massacre and to preach and for confessiannihilation, but you like it better talking to a few people at a time, not all at a once in a big big group.  You were awful crowded in that little room.  You were awful tight and close.  Maybe some time you’ll be okay to get all crowded up with other trolls again, but for now it’s easier to wander in the dark times, when the whole ship is silent and at peace.

And it’s just such a wander as that when you see him.

It’s your ancestor, your matesprit, coming out a door and locking it tight behind him.  He stretches, cracks his back and groans, and for all your pan knows that groan was just for the relief of a crack from a tightened-up cartilage column, your bulge and your nook are already plenty ready to take it as something more amenable to your wants and needs. 

Kurloz is in black from his chin to his wrists down to his bare feet, leaving footprints all brown and yellow blood-stained on the ship’s floor as he walks slow and tired down the hall towards you.  Purple—your purple, his purple—are all scrolled real subtle on his collar and his symbol and signed on his chest over his blood-pusher.  Not an outfit for mirth—that’s inquisitioner’s gear, something to be ruined with blood and piss and sweat and tears, ruined and then burned.  He’s pulling at it even while you walk up to meet him, undoing his collar and rolling his bloody sleeves up his bloodier arms.  He’s crusted blood and you’re dripping sweat and you both look terrible and when you wave at him at the corner of his eye he turns his head, all weary, and glances at you.  Glances again, and some of the weariness drops off of him.  He smiles at you and beckons.

“Long night?” 

You nod, admiring; his arms are miraculous bright, rainbows of color, and he lets you reach out and take his frond in yours, looking all at the colors.  “Not long like yours,” you guess, and his big thumb strokes your knuckles, smears some of that rainbow onto you.  “This is all motherfuckin’ gorgeous.  Work of art all itself.”

“True,” he says, and holds up his other hand to admire.  “…gotta get it all scoured clean though, ain’t in no way motherfuckin’ pure enough to paint a wall.  Maybe you should come and help me some time, drain some blood nice and clean.”  He makes like to ruffle up your hair, then catches himself, glares at his arms all bloody and then lowers them again and grins.  “…you ever wanted to help paint a wall of a holy chapel?” 

Your pusher jumps up into your mouth and shines out of you in the biggest big grin.  “—I—can I—?  Is that even a thing I can—”

“If the soul all pours out those wicked colors,” he rumbles, and sways your hands back and forth between you.  “If the soul bleeds those wicked colors in purity and in faith, little brother, ain’t my place to deny willing fronds a canvas.”

You jump forward at him, wrap your arms all around his chest and squeeze him so hard he huffs out a breath of air and actually takes a step back.  Then he laughs and pats your sweaty, nasty, sticky back, and thumbs the tip of one horn—not sensitive, not enough to really make you feel it or send you falling apart, just his touch on your horns, that weird, tingling  _sense_ of him.  He smells like salt and age and blood and your head is up to his chest now, your horns can reach up to his chin.  His hands still spread all across your thorax between the ridges of your back, and you still feel so small…

“ _Little one_ ,” he calls you, soft and coaxing like he heard you thinking.  “It has been a properly long time.”

“ _Never stop calling me that,_ ” you mumble into his thorax, into the soft black cloth, and he laughs like a mountain moving and rubs slow circles on your back. 

“You got it, little brother.”

He holds on to you a while longer, and then he breathes out and lets you go, pushing your arms off him really gentle even though you whine in protesting upset.

“Now,” he says, chiding.  “Don’t be all clinging on me, I smell like death and you ain’t much better.  Gotta go and get all cleaned up before I’m decent to touch another troll.”  And then he looks down at your face, and a hint of a wicked grin hits his face.  “…you should come with.”

Oh  _fuck_  yes.  Praise messiahs that he finally has the time, praise messiahs you met him here and him all in such a good mood, not too tired for you, praise motherfuckin’  _messiahs._

You take his hand again, and you walk off to his quarters in the empty halls, with his claws dug into the soft of your palm until your blood joins the rainbow on his skin.

  
\--

Kurloz’s ablution block is a beauty of a thing, as all old church places on this ship are. It’s still not big, big enough for maybe a handful of trolls not as big as he is, but it just about fits him and you with room to stretch out and move around. Seats around the edges of it, already wet from the falling water, and room in the middle of those seats for someone to stand up and move around. It’s not fancy, but it’s rich in different ways from imperial gold and gems; plain and dim but lit up with gold light that glints on the steam in the air. The walls are all painted colors and then something laid over them that makes them shiny and smooth and drives away the wet; the jewel-colors of the blood glint with drops of water and golden light and it is breathtaking beautiful. The water ain’t in a tight, chilly spray like the trainees got it; it falls from the ceiling of the ablution block in a warm, uneven drip like a tiny thunderstorm, just hot enough to make you close your eyes and shiver from how good it feels on your chilled skin.

He walks in ahead of you, stands in the water for a second and then strips his bloody shirt off his shoulders. His thorax is a mass of scars and muscle, flexing and fluid, and goddamn but his  _ass_ , the wet fabric all clinging to his legs, the way his shoulders flex from the back...

He half-turns and sees you looking; he grins as he reaches up and twists his wild hair up and into a rough tie, knots it with a piece of twine out of his sylladex. Slides his pants down his hips. You stand there staring like a moron, open your mouth to say something and instead you just make a quiet whimpering noise. Fucking hell, he knows he ruins you like this, he knows how bad you want him to fuck you and he’s got blood on his hands that runs in rainbow rivers as the water comes down on you both. You find a jealous stab in your guts when you realize he’s already half-unsheathed from hurting them.

He should be hurting  _you._

“...go on,” he purrs, and settles back on one of the seats along the wall, reaches down and slides his fingers between his own legs, his long, lean, scarred thighs fuck he’s so much older than you and so scarred and worn and so fucking  _gorgeous_ , you can’t ever say enough prayers of thanks for this, for  _him_. His paint is starting to wet, to rub away, and have you ever seen him so, have you ever seen his bare face? Your pusher is all up in your windchute. “...get naked.”

You start tearing at your clothes like it’s a mission. He growls low and long and loud. The sound rolls around the walls like thunder and you stop, shivering at that sound, all the danger it promises you.

“... _slower_ ,” he orders you. “...and don’t you fucking touch yourself without my permission, you understand?” He smiles, and his teeth are a wet glint as he licks water of his lips. “... _gotta make motherfuckin’ sure you remember not to get_ greedy _._  “

The tiny noise you make hits the walls and bounces loud, and your face feels as hot as the water. You try again, slide your sweaty shirt up as slow as you can bear---it sticks to you with water and you have to twist and squirm a little to pull it off of your soaked thorax and that makes him purr. It hums in your bones. “There you go,” he murmurs to you, and his voice is all around you, bouncing off all the walls. “ _...look at you…”_  His hand moves on his bulge and you wish it was yours, you can see his face go slack and pleased, his eyes half-close as he watches you. You move your hands to your soaked pants and start to slide them down “—stop.”

He considers you for a second; your hands already shaking from eagerness and how you squirm. Then he smiles.

“Clean your face, little brother,” he tells you, purrs it low in his chest with satisfaction, and you shiver all hot and tight in the center of you at how tender he speaks to you. “Let me see you all in entirety today.”

Your shirt is already soaked and ruined; you take the fabric and scrub your wetted paint off your skin, turn your face to the hot rain and then open your eyes and meet him eye to eye. You can’t hold it; all sudden-like is your face hot, your pump biscuit going twice as hard and fast. He’s still painted, but the skin around his lips, his eyes, they are slowly fading clean, you can see purple and grey under the paint. You have to work to breathe.

“...you put your hands on that wall,” he says, and nods to the one across from him. “...you get one hand to get the rest of the way naked with, wriggler, I want the other one motherfucking  _glued_  there.” He grins at you, and when he props one foot up on the couch with him you can see the slit of his nook and his fingers flexing and you whine. “ _Got it_?”

You do as you’re told. Leaning over the couch to reach the wall puts you bent over a few feet in front of him, puts your ass at the right height and reach and it shocks but doesn’t surprise when the first thing he does is swat your ass hard, once on either side. It stings and the slap on the wet fabric is loud in the echoing quiet; your moan is even louder.

“ _Get on with it_ ,” he rumbles, and watches you twist and squirm out of your pants, twitch every time your wrist rubs past your bulge, shudder at the soft, sliding noises he makes behind you. Every time you’re starting to get the hang of it, getting your balance, he gives you another slap he aims so keen and cruel, right for the spot between your ass and the backs of your legs where it stings the best and you lose it again. It takes what feels like a torturous motherfucking  _eternity_  for you to get finally naked, and by the time you have your breath is coming fast and deep, your ass is stinging under the water and your bulge is coiling hungrily between your legs. You put your hand back on the wall, breathe deep, and wait.

“ _Get your head down_ ,” says his voice behind you, and you drop your head down. “Farther _._   _Get your ass in the air, little one, show me your nook_  His claws trace the border of the stinging ache he’s set in your skin and your back arches without your consent, your throat makes a needy little trill that coaxes him to slap you again, sharp and almost playful. “... _been neglecting it, haven’t I?_ “ he says, and you can hear him smiling. “...well. We’ll fix that.”

For a second every muscle in you kind of seizes up with pure, pan-breaking  _need_ , and then you’re scrambling to obey him, drop your head down and spread your legs out like shame ain’t even a thing you’ve ever heard of and you  _have_  heard of it, no mistaking that, the concept been made acquainted to you, but the thing is you  _don’t fucking care_  because yes,  _yes FUCK YES._  He makes little sounds, all approving, and you hear him groan down deep in his thorax, hear something wet and slick moving as he shifts his hands between his legs.

“You look so good,” he repeats to you again, and you can hear him moving behind you, the water’s sound as it falls on him changing. “You keep right where you are now, you understand?  _Don’t you motherfucking move._  And let’s see if I can’t take good care...” and his finger tickles from the front of your nook to the back, barely there and teasing so your whole body feels on fire. “... _of what’s_ mine.”

And then his hands close tight as shackles around your thighs and something slick and cool slides all and at once right into your nook. Your whole body spasms and all your thoughts go straight all to hell, spinning around useless, you lose track of words and wail and shudder trying to keep still. For a second you think it’s his bulge and your insides lurch so you can’t even breathe but then you feel the cool prickles of fangs and his lips and you make a noise breathless and shocked and unbelievably fucking turned on because he has his  _tongue_  up your nook and you are going to fucking  _die_. It’s gentle, nothing but pleasure, boiling and hot in the pit of your stomach and your claws drag on the smooth wall in front of you, on the painted sacraments to the messiahs. He pulls back and chuckles when you writhe, then leans in, sets his fangs light against the inside of your nook, and  _bites_.

You scream at the top of your lungs, and then scream again, cracked and despairing, when he pulls away and soothes that spot with his tongue, stealing the pain away from you and replacing it all soft and sweet. His hands come up, his rough thumbs spread your nook wider for him so he can pick and choose  _exactly_ where to touch you, little explosions of ecstasy, and you just tremble and sob and let him fuck you with his tongue until you can’t hardly even bear it.

“ _Please,_ “ you’re gasping now, more desperate every second, and he flicks over something inside you that makes your vision go white, makes like he’s going to bite again and then pulls away with a laugh and goes back to pouring pleasure on you, driving you right out of your head. “  _Ah nn-no,_ no _please fuck please let me—_!” he laughs again, and the hum of his laugh is an agony of pleasure, it drives you half-frantic and your knees try to give out but his hands wrap tight around you and hold you there for his pleasure. “—please god oh god Kurloz— _please_  ‘m fucking begging you—!”

He hoists you up with his hands on your legs, spreads your legs until they ache, and then his mouth slips down and presses over where your nook meets the root of your bulge and you fall to tiny pieces.

He doesn’t let you rest; sucks and tongues and scrapes his fangs over that tiny patch of white-hot, torturous pleasure all the time you’re coming, crying out and thrashing. Only when you’re going limp again, shivering and panting and feeling the water and the slurry drip down your legs only then does he take his mouth away and pull you up against him to laugh in your ear. His bulge is behind your back, between you and him; you’re oversensitive and dizzy and barely come down off your high, but your bulge still throbs and lashes at the feeling of it moving slow behind you.

“Well fuck, think you may have been a bit eager for that,” he teases you drags his claws up and down your thigh, prickling. “Usually takes at least a  _little_  longer than that before you’re begging.”

You mumble something slurring and nasty about his lusus and pinch him, and he mocks a growl at you and pinches you back, considerable harder and enough to make you squirm on him. His bulge moves behind you again. You freeze and then, slowly, thinking, press into his claws and let out another moan. Another twitch of interest behind you. You get into the wrong place in your pan sometimes, place where you think of the pain he gives you as a favor he does, as a burden on him you forget, sometimes, how he is taken with you and your pain, how he loves to hurt you. Motherfuckin’ serendipity. Purest, reddest and most flushed serendipity, you both bein’ so strange in your pans, your endless appetites for the same exact things.

You are flushed hard and red and pure for him, and a sudden thought seizes you. You bend down and reach out, drag up your soaked shirt off the floor, and you turn around on his lap to look him in the face. His eyes are keen on you, but soft. The air between you all warm and quiet as the hot rain falls down on you both.

“Can I,” you start to say, shaky, but you can’t find the words and instead you touch his face, smear his paint a little with one thumb at the corner of his eye. He stares at you with eyes just a little wide, and then he settles again, blinks at you slow and even, considering you.

Then he nods.

You pull yourself up him till you can reach his mouth and kiss him—not often you do it first, that you kiss him instead of the other way around.  He makes a little startled sound and then hums, pleased at you, and pulls you up with his hands under your ass; wraps your legs around his stomach and holds you where your mouth can reach his.  He didn’t ever touch your bulge when he was tongue-fucking you, and it’s still plenty motherfucking eager to go; you make desperate noises for him just how you know he likes and curl yourself against him, trying to get more.

“Thought you were going to clean me up?”  He says in your ear after a while, teasing, and you stop sucking his throat and gasp for air a little and remember what you were doing in the first place.  His paint is older than yours, not changed so often, layered more thickly, and it takes careful force to scrub it off of him, to smear away the holy face and expose that grey troll skin underneath.  It would almost be pale, all this softness, like taking care of him, except for his claws kneading at your ass and his hands slowly rolling your hips up against him so the hand cleaning his face is made to tremble.  There is no pale touch here.  This is flush, whole and in its entirety, this is mating fondness all coiling tight in your guts until you can hardly breathe with it.

You’ve cleaned up his cheeks, the soft spaces around his eyes, you’re tracing his lips with your fingertips when something cool and wet strokes the edge of your nook and is gone again.  You jump and chirp—he bares his teeth at you, watching your face, and it happens again, a teasing little flick of soft flesh on yours.  It feels almost like his tongue, that soft, sinuous stroke, but his tongue is tracing his lips and flicking over your fingertips and you know what has to be touching you.

“Haven’t finished the job yet, little one,” he purrs at you, and the very tip of his bulge flicks past your nook again, makes you shiver and clench up with wanting.  “Go on.”

“— _please…_ ”

“Mmm…” he considers for a few second, and then leans forward and steals a messy kiss from your gasping mouth.  “… _nope._   Get me cleaned up, wriggler.   _See the motherfucking job right through to the ending._ ”

Your hand is shaking so hard it’s hard to raise it to his face, but you trace it over the paint on his lips until they’re dark and clean and wet, until his face is bare of paint and blood, until he opens his eyes and looks at you and he looks almost like someone you don’t know.  His face is all motherfuckin’ gorgeous angles and planes, clean-shaped like stone, there are lines at the corners of his mouth and his eyes from mirth and rage.  You notice new things all of a sudden; how his eyelashes are thick and dark and there’s a scar over his lip from his chin to the corner of his nose that makes his smile curve up to sneer a little. 

His cheeks are just a touch purple under your hands, and you drop your filthy shirt and stroke your fingers, trembling, across his bare skin.  He catches your fingers with the tip of his tongue and then bends his head and pins them in his teeth, bites just hard enough to sting and promise pain, then lets you go.  His eyes are a wickedness. 

“ _Good boy_ ,” he chirrs at you, and you cling at him as he resettles you in his hands—and then arch your back and gasp as his bulge finds your nook again, more solid this time, enough it can slip just a little inside and stroke back and forth, back and fucking forth— “ _Not much longer now._ ”

“I can take it  _now_ ,” you plead at him, knowing he’s not going to let you, knowing he won’t move on this,  _needing_  it anyway, “—I  _can_  please I swear I c—I c-can—fuck, come on, please…”

He chuckles and pets your hair instead, and you drop your head onto his chest and groan.

“ _You all takin’ every pleasure in torturin’ me_ ,” you groan, and he laughs again.  “ _Kurloz_ , motherfucking god _damn_ , that ain’t even funny.”

“I think it’s motherfuckin’ hilarious,” he says all smug, and flicks his bulge back and forth again just to make you whimper into his neck.  “Funny as hell, for serious.  Impatient little wriggler boy, hark at you whine.”

You swat at him weakly and he lowers you another tiny measure in payback, just enough to almost reach properly inside you, almost,  _almost…_

“ _Beautiful,_ ” he chirrs at you as you gasp for breathing, and then so sudden you lose your breath he lets you go and drops you down into his lap.  You lose the teasing touch at your nook and cry out immediately from loss and frustration and fucking  _need,_  but he takes your jaw in a hand and tilts you up to silence that with a kiss and—

His bulge wraps around yours, rippling and squeezing and you fucking lose it, you can’t even  _deal_ with this anymore.   Words fucking fail you and you just cling to him in shock and make noises, pointless sounds and gasps and whines, pleading as well as you can.  He laughs at you and tilts you forward so the tip of his bulge can wind around and rub the spot he used to make you come the first time, teasing-soft, and your body spasms in overwrought needing, your voice rises into a wail that makes him purr at you.  It’s not an aimless motion; he squeezes at you on purpose and then muffles your screaming with his mouth when he goes to rubbing at the root of your bulge with his own, when your whole body tries to thrash.

“ _Takes some practice,_ ” he tells you, and ripples all around you, lets you cling at him.  The water is running all down you in hot trickles, your skin is oversensitive and feverish and he bites and nips at your lips and your throat, leaves you bruises and stinging marks.  “… _Some pretty fuckin’ sweet self-control.  We’ll teach you that, too._ ”  He wraps his hands around your bulge and his wrapped together and gives a heavy  _squeeze_ and holds on tight as you scream and buck into his hand.  “…. _hush_ , little one.  So fucking eager.”

“No  _shit!_ ” you snarl at him all strangled, and he roars laughing and swats your ass where you’re already sore.  “Nnh—! You’re the biggest bulge-tease in—god, god god  _god_ —no fucking  _shit_ I’m eager— _ahh—_ ah—!”

“Say somethin’ sweet, little one,” he purrs to you, and he tears burning welts into your back with his claws, stinging and sharp as the water rains into them.  There’s just a touch of salt to it and that touch  _burns_ , hurts  _so fucking good_.  He’s got you wrapped up all tight and close in his arms and his claws in your back and his face pressed up in your hair at one horn and you just sob from good feeling, just hold on to him and fucking  _cry_.  “You been pretty salty with me today, you better all endear yourself to me or who knows when I’ll get tired of playin’ with you—”

“ _Flushed for you,_ ” you choke, desperate and fucking prostrated to your messiahs with love of him, and that makes him catch a breath on whatever he was saying, makes his hands close tight on you and pull you to him.  You kiss him and maybe he can taste the tears on your face even if they’re lost in all the water falling on you; he softens a little from his wicked glee at your suffering.  He rocks you in his lap, he kisses you back. 

“ _Yeah,_ ” he says, gentle in your ear.  “ _Yeah, that’ll do.  That’ll do just motherfuckin’ fine._ ”

He sinks his teeth almost soft into your lip, your purring rumbles through his and hums through your thorax, you share between you the taste of your blood and you are gone, gone gone gone, far off and peaceful and flying away as his whole body shudders close up under you like an ocean wave. 

He cradles you and lets the water fall over you both, wipes away the slurry and sweat and the tears and the blood where he clawed your back.  He cleans off too, slow and tired and sated, and you watch him through a haze, purring, soaking up the warm. 

“Come on, little one,” he tells you, and he pushes your hair back off your wet cheeks.  You kiss his fingers sleepily as they pass you; he snorts and tugs a lock of hair.  “Quit that, you greedy little fucker, I gone and spoiled you enough for one day.  Get up now, let’s get you dried off.”

“ _Mmngh,_ ” you complain, and roll over so it rains warm and gentle on your back instead.  Everything is fuzzy and happy and warm and you don’t particularly want to go anywhere else right now, thanks.  “Nnh.”

“Showing off your fine little ass at me is not going to change my mind, brother,” he chuckles at you, and he reaches out, wraps an arm around you and scoops you up around the thorax so your arms and legs are all hanging and flailing around.  You yelp and flounder, and he laughs at you.  “Shut your trap, wriggler!  Little grub doesn’t want to walk, so little grub gets carried around buck-ass naked.  Hush up now.”


	7. All Colors Night

Gamzee gives up on struggling after that and goes back to his imitation of limp meat--warm, purring meat. Sleepy-and-naked-and-cute-as-hell meat. Point being, when he realizes you’re not going to put him down he happily changes his tactic and just slumps and lets you manhandle him around. You humor him, because you been causing pain all night and it ain’t properly flushed unless you’re kind with him once in a while. He makes little noises all soft and happy when you dry him off and comb at his hair with your fingers, and you just want--just want to--

... _something_. You are all knotted up of yourself, can’t think what you want to do, just this tight, all-over need. It’s like being hungry but you aren’t hungry. Like the urge to fuck him except your body ain’t coming into the play of it at all. You just  _want_  him. Want to be nearer to him than you can ever even motherfucking be.Goddamn but you are so helplessly,  _hopelessly_  flushed for this boy.

You have to stop right where you stand and think about that for a second, but then you stand still too long and he, all naked and tangled up in his towels, growing but pitiable-small, marked all over with you and yours, he shifts and reaches for you and you have to come to him.

“... _we’ll paint in the afternoon_ ,” you promise him, and he pulls your hand down to kiss your worn-up, battered claws. Then he sighs and curls up and settles in to sleep.

Your coon is huge--has to be, to fit you--and you consider it, consider him, consider whether you’ve built up enough credit with the messiahs to miracle Gamzee upright and walking back to his own block, and then give up and pull him into the sopor with you. He comes up to your chest now, with his horns added on his height (they’re growing too fast for him right now, in that awkward time before second pupation where your horns want to be adult but your body ain’t quite with you on that yet) but his horns grow out and up like yours and you can fit your chin between them and curl him up with you.

You drift off like that, and if you hold him close enough you think you can feel his pusher, feel the blood running through him, and you sleep.

\--

You wake up first, because he’s shifting around in your arms. He shudders a little bit and clings at himself--he is tight with unease and fear. You think you know what he must be dreamin’ about--you been having a choice dream or two yourself these few weeks.  
 _“Safe now,_ “ you mumble to him, barely awake and yawning. “ _Got you._ “

He stills and sighs and then starts to shift awake, a touch at a time. Time to get up? Fuck, probably. You’re not sure what time it’s gotta be, but he’s just barely shivering awake, curling into your chest and the warm slime, mumbling in his sleep. His hair is slicked off of his face by slime, there’s a tiny smear of grey paint on his cheek and when you stroke a thumb over his lip he makes a quiet little noise and purrs. Rubs up against you.

“ _Little precious one_ ,” you hum at him, and he blinks and opens his eyes. Day and night aren’t nothing up in the stars as you are, but you still sleep on the days and nights of the home planet and your pan is telling you it’s maybe late day, maybe early nighttime on the second night of the week of all colors. You got no way to know for sure.

All you know is, you’re just now barely awake, he’s sleepy and soft and vulnerable as all hell, and neither of you has a place to be. You want to fuck him. You want him falling to pieces on your bulge.

You can’t yet, though.

You sigh the sigh of the endlessly frustrated and then jump a little bit as something occurs to you. You picked up the next size of toy before you went to torture, but you were enjoying it so teasing him, and then he was all laid out and limp and tired and sated and you just wanted him at peace. You forgot to put it in.

Now’s the time, then.

“Come on,” you purr at him, and he shakes his head a little and almost hits you in the face with his horns. You pinch the base of one and _that_  wakes him up a little for sure. “Let’s get cleaned up.”

“... _‘s a holiday_ ,” he grumbles, and bonks his head against your chest all complaining-like. “... _d’n motherfuckin’ wanna._ “

You roll your eyes at him, get all his skinny body up and bundled up into your arms, and slide you both out of the ‘coon. It’s right there by the ablutions block, of course--why would you put a recuperacoon anywhere else, being as you gotta go and get the slime off every morning--and you slap the panel and set the water on as you go in. The splash seems to wake him up a little bit, and he tosses his horns as the slime all melts down his face in little bright drips of green.

“ _...we go to the ‘coon last night_?” he mumbles, and sits up, bares all his white little wriggler-fangs in a yawn. He’ll have a spread of fangs more fearsome after pupation, but he’s still just so small. Whatever you’ve got left for a pusher, it breaks a little bit. You didn’t figure that was still possible, but you feel it. You feel it full and motherfucking keen. “...we just--sleep in here?” 

“Nah, put you up in the cupe,” you get his hair back out of his face--wipe sopor streaks off his face. And then you spring your trap. 

“Hey,” you say, like you’re askin’ about the weather, about the current state of his art, “...you like sunset pailing?” 

That takes about a second and a half of delay to get to his pan, but you know when it does because he goes stiff and sputters. 

“--I,” he says, “--uh. Yeah, I mean, fuck, sure, I--why’s a brother asking, just for--” 

“ _Just something I forgot to do yesterday,_ “ you purr in his ear, and his back goes straight all of a sudden as you slide a hand down his back, hook up and under him and stroke his nook with the very tip of one finger. You can feel the muscles inside him clench up, feel him shiver as he starts to wake up. “... _You didn’t remind me, little brother, I’m all motherfuckin’_ disappointed _in you._ “ 

“ _Hnghhh_ ,” he goes, all chokey and high-up and hoarse, and then clears his throat and breathes deep and hard for a few seconds. You’re still lazy and warm and slow-thinking from the sopor and the sleep and the warmth; you let yourself melt back and purr as he tries to figure words. “...don’t rightly know what you’re-- _hhh--_ t-talking about--?” 

And then you get two fingers in there and give him a little  _stretch_  and he gasps and goes “-- _oh_ ,” really soft. 

“Remember now?” 

“ _Oh_ ,” he says again, and he tenses up and quivers again inside, you feel the first bit of slickness just starting in his nook. You can feel the spot you bit down last night; you drag your claws over it and he whines and squirms, grinding down on your fingers. “Fuck, yeah--yes, _please_ , give me somethin’--” 

“ _Oh, I’ll_ give you _plenty_ ,” you purr for him, and for all as cheesy as it is, he holds on to you so hard his claws dig into your skin and buries his face in your chest with a hungry little noise that goes straight to your bulge. “Get on your back,” you order, sharp and fast and hard, and he pulls back a little and looks up at you all sad and betrayed when you pull your hand out from between his legs. You smile back at him, all your teeth. “...I want to see your face,” you tell him, “...when I put this in you.” 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, and his voice is all ragged already, all breathless. He staggers back against the seats at the edges of the block, long, lean lines and scars and fucking  _miles_  of leg, goddamn. You’re pretty leggy too, but like fuck it ever looked this good on you. He spreads his legs for you and waits, panting--makes this lovely little fluting, husky noise, and it takes some part of your pan even older than you been alive and pulls you all taut inside. You come forward to him, stroke a big, roughed knuckle against his cheek and he leans into it and smiles at you. 

“... _miracles,_ “ he tells you, really soft, and you don’t have to ask what, because you know. 

“Motherfuckin’  _miracles_ ,” you agree, and you take his wrists and pin his hands up above his head to kiss him breathless. 

By the time you pull away you’re both breathing hard and he grins at you all toothy and bright. “...good night to you too,” he says, and you laugh and kiss him again, light and quick this time. 

“Good night, brother.” You consider him; you’re both still all sleepy and slow, and he yawns again in the silence, shakes his head a little and scatters water off his hair. He looks like he wants it, but he also got a look to him like he’d just as soon curl up and go back to sleep. 

“What’s the wait for?” He asks finally, and you jump a little and realize you zoned right the fuck out. 

“Just trying to figure if you were up for this.” You kiss his pointy nose and he wrinkles it up at you like an offended meowbeast. “Went hard last night, little one.” 

“You asking that  _now_?” he snorts at you and stretches all over, twists and arches and you hope to fuck he is up for it because you certainly are. “Asking that after all that shit you just said at me? _Fill me the fuck up already._ “   
 _  
Hell_  yes. 

“You say the sweetest things,” you tell him, fond, and he grins at you like he knows full well how his eagerness gets to you (dumb as rocks sometimes, but he’s a devious little shit). 

You don’t start right in, of course. You’re right well and fully motherfucking pleased thinking on how hard this is going to hit him, how big it is and the noises he’ll make, but you ain’t intending to hurt him in ways that bleed. That’s okay though--prep him up long enough, it’ll slide like a dream. 

So you do, you sit and you hold him and you just toy with him easy, gentle and slow enough the tease is a pleasure and a torment all itself. He squirms and complains at you, of course he does, in those half-broken little noises he makes when you’re distracting him from word-thinking, but that shit is funny as all hell and you just laugh. “Hurry the  _fuck up already_ ,” he grumbles finally, when he’s pieced the words all together one at a time, and rolls his hips up against your hand, tries to get you to press harder. You gentle even more in repayment, and he whines and gets your message, stops struggling. 

“Gotta get you all ready, little brother,” you tell him, and he groans. “Make sure this goes in no harder than it ought.” 

“There’s other stuff _fffuck_ \--other stuff to--use for that,” he growls, and you have to laugh, concede that point. 

“True,” you say, fair as fair, and stroke his bulge again, so gentle, root to tip. He makes a precious little shard of a howl, tugs at your grip but can’t pull free. “...but why would I ever even bother, when you’re so fun to get dripping all on your own?” 

He pants out the beginning of an answer, but every time he starts to make words you amuse yourself with the fingers up his nook, spreading and stroking and digging in your claws until he truly is wet as sweet sin and he’s making little desperate noises with every breath. You go for your modus finally, and he groans in relief, but instead of going straight for the toy you packed up last night, you pull out a strip of cloth dyed your purple--cover up his eyes and knot it tight in the back. 

“ _Make sure you got nothin’ to distract you from what you’re about to motherfucking feel,_ “ you murmur in his ear, and he makes a shuddering little sound. “ _Feel it for good and all, right up to the tips of your horns, little one. You sing the fuck out for me, y’hear_? You make some sweet, _sweet_  fuckin’ music for me.” 

He whines and shudders all over, and you laugh a little and pull his thighs open wide and wider and until his joints strain. His nook is all twitching and needy for you; his bulge seeking at it, making him shudder from his greed. You stroke his bulge where it presses just the first little bit into his nook and he jumps, whimpers.

“What is it you think you’re doing here?” You ask him, and pinch with your claws at the rim of his nook. He squalls and struggles and pants. 

“ _Just, I,_ “ he struggles to say the words--you stop for a moment to let him, amused. “-- _just, fucking--want_ yours _\--_!”   
 _  
Fuck_  that is precious. You groan for him and he makes a breathless noise in return; sink your claws back into his nook, real gentle, and he stops making words for the moment and goes back to sweet sound, wordless, sunk in sensation. 

“Me too, little one,” you tell him, and pull his bulge out of himself, hold it with one hand and stroke the underside with your thumb. He hitches and squirms. “We’ll get there.” 

You pull the toy out of your sylladex and weigh its entirety in your hand--it’s big, properly too big for anyone smaller than your line can become, for a normal brother or sister or some lowblood shitbag. But you know he’ll take it, you’re already almost dripping imagining him try. How fucking  _tight_  it’s going to be, how he’ll struggle, what sounds he’ll make, will he  _cry_  for you...? 

You set the tip of it at his nook and slick it up, roll it against him, and then push the first little bit inside and watch him just fucking  _fall to bits._ It’s been a while, and his mouth drops open and at the first stretch--his breathing goes all tight and fast a second later, he sets his fangs hard in his lip. You slow down and coo over him, a mockery of concern, and he snaps his fangs at you crossly and makes demands he ain’t got a single way to force you to heed,  _faster you fucking asshole, I’m gonna ah--_ ahh--and he arches up and whimpers, not really done, just a half a climax from shock as much as pleasure, when you give a sudden hard twist and shove and bury another finger’s width into him. 

You don’t go any faster.

\--

He doesn’t go  _any_  fucking  _faster_. 

By the time he’s got it fully inside you you’ve hit that hot, white point twice more, not quite enough,  _just_  not coming, never motherfucking _enough_  to let out that shaking stretch and coil inside you—just overloaded, whited out and begging for more both at once. You’re panting as he takes his hand away and lets it settle inside you, that big, unfor-motherfucking-giving hardness inside you. Ain’t like getting fucked with someone’s bulge, no moving, no softness whatever—it’s not there to get you off, its just there for the stretch of it, the sting and throb in your guts of just-barely-pain. Kurloz chuckles somewhere in front of you, taps the end of it that’s still out of you so it jolts you a little inside, and then he presses the tip of your bulge between two fingers, squeezes it just hard enough you’re up on your toes, arched up and on the edge of something _real_ , all your muscles shaking all through you—

He lets go.

You make noises of complaint on him, whine and growls and swear up a fucking storm on him, but he just holds your hands above your head and laughs at you as you squirm around. He reaches out with his hand that’s free and whips off the blindfold; when you start to be able to see again he’s licking purple off his fingers, and you just fucking  _know_  it’s not his own.

“Convince me to let you,” he rumbles at you, and he pulls you up close to him so his bulge strokes along yours—so good  _so motherfucking good_ —and puts the cloth he had over your eyes around your wrists instead, ties them behind your back. “Go on.”

You got no hands, so what you got to make do with is your mouth. You taste the pulse in his throat, his chipped ears, his jaw, his lips, chew on the arcs of his collarbones spelled out so fine under his skin, and he hums and toys with your bulge all gentle and soft and  _not enough_  until you almost bite him for real. Pretty sure when he gives you orders like that,  _convince me_ , he means he wants you getting him off, and to do that you gotta go lower than this—which means you gotta pull away from his hand on your bulge. 

You kind of slide and whimper your way down onto the floor, and he makes interested, pleased noises when you lick and suck at long-healed wounds, his stomach, his grubscars, his fuckin’ gorgeous naked hips, messiahs you’re  _throbbing._  You never get too much sound from him, he’s so quiet, but that just means that when he  _does_ make a sound it hits you hard as all motherfuck and you have to sit back and breathe when you get properly to the ground and look up at him over you, watching you amused and huge and powerful.

“… _Go on,_ ” he says, really quiet, and you whimper like someone half your age to see him part his legs, the length and breadth of his bulge and the way he watches you like you’re something so worth seeing. He’s been enjoying it, stuffing your nook, making you like this. He’s been watching and enjoying you. “ _I said_ convince me _._ ”

You don’t trust that you could fit him in your mouth even if you did trust yourself with your fangs and all, but you got a tongue and you got lips and you know for fucking sure, you  _know_  you got a face he loves seeing when you’re out of your pan for him and smeared with his slurry and desperate. You got ways to bend him for you just like he can bend you—just yours are different, trickier, and you haven’t figured them all out yet. Sometimes they win it for you and he breaks and finishes playin’ his games with you for the day. Sometimes makes him want to torture you more, longer, make you scream and beg till well toward sunset. 

So you set to with a will, try to hammer it into your pan what he likes, what he doesn’t seem to care for, what—

…what—

…what was that noise he just made?

You ducked your head down to get to the underside of his bulge and your lips and your tongue found the very upper part of his nook all accidental-like, right about that spot he uses to drive you out of your pan and screaming whenever it suits him—right that instant he’d gone stiff and still all over, made a noise you haven’t  _ever_  heard him make before—a strange, breathy noise all chirping and rattling and weird. You pull back and away and lean your cheek on his thigh to breathe; press a kiss there and he huffs out a startled breath. You can see his nook, see him shiver and clench and you realize sudden and sure you ain’t ever touched him there before. It’s never a thing he’s had you do. 

You lean in and he tenses up again. You kiss right up tight in the line of his hip, right at the rim of his nook, and he makes that noise again. Sounds shaky. Uncontrolled. You fucking  _love_ it.

“ _Gamzee_ …” he starts, growling, slow, and then you lean in all the way and press in as far as you can reach, fucking  _bury_  yourself in him, and he  _keens_. One of his hands is around your horn all of a sudden, and at first he’s pushing you back but then you find a little spot just a bit different from what you felt so far. When you laugh into him, giddy and breathless and all but motherfucking drowned in the smell of him, all of a sudden he’s moaning again, pulling you in instead and cursing. Some spots better than others. Fuck, your tongue ain’t fond of this, but the rest of you is  _well_  pleased for fucking sure. 

So pleased you start purring, and he makes a noise that’s sharp and needing and breathless and pulls you in so hard there’s a second where air gets away from you and you can’t even fucking breathe. Wow,  _fuck_  you need to make him do that again—but you ain’t in that easy, settled place where a purr comes easy, so you just smile, hook your hands over his thighs as they shake, take a breath and  _hum_ —

All of a sudden you’re coughing and wet all down your face and chest and he slumps back in his chair with a groan like you gone and killed him. 

Then he looks down at you and sees you grinning at him like he just went and gave you every treasure in his claws all at once, and he groans again and drops his head back again against the ablution block wall. 

“Oh, fuck you,” he says, but he don’t sound like he means it. 

“ _Wow._ ”

“Shut up.”

“Why haven’t you ever let me at your nook before now!” You lean on his legs and try to settle in some way as doesn’t touch your bulge because you want  _him_  getting you off but goddamn you want a touch, a word,  _anything_. “…does  _anybody_  ever get to touch it?”

“Shut your whore mouth you little heathen,” he growls, and kicks at you with no real force. “…and no. Fuck no they don’t.”

You think you’re all about set to explode from happy. Getting him off always makes you feel like emperor, but that hard and that fast, it ain’t ever happened before. He didn’t even need hurtin’ you, just the way you touched him had him all laid out like this, still shaky in the legs and his cheeks with a little purple in them.

“Maybe— _maybe_ —I’m. not entirely used to that shit,” he says, and his face is actually honest-to-god going purple all up to the tips of his ears and he’s got his legs squeezed shut and he can’t look right at your face and you have to make the truly motherfucking killer choice of should you drop your head and just laugh or should you spread your legs and cry a lot and hope he deigns to finish you off before you pass right the fuck out. But you’re church of mirth to your core and in the end, there’s really no choice to make. You collapse forward laughing and nudge your filthy face into his stomach, make him jump. Laugh like hell.

“ _…bro_ ,” you choke, and he swats you on the back of the head but it just makes you laugh harder. “—bro, ain’t my fault your nook’s an easy touch, but god _damn_  am I all glad of it, I gotta do that _every day,_  please please  _pleeeaaaase_  come on, let’s go again, you make the prettiest noises—”

“You little fucking  _wriggler_ ,” he says, trying for stern but falling pretty well short—he grabs you under the arms and hauls you up into his lap. When he gets his hands on your ass and tugs you in you kind of stop laughing, because it traps your bulge all of a sudden between you and his stomach and you choke on your own tongue. “ _Hush yourself._ ”

“Won’t ever,” you say, and when you start laughing again he grumbles deep in his throat, pulls you over to one side and oh,  _oh_ ,  _fuck_  he’s got you trapped with your face pressed into the arm of his chair, your legs hooked under one of his, your ass in the air. It’s still funny but now you are in significant danger of basically checking out for the dark carnival if he doesn’t  _touch your fucking bulge_ , like  _now._  You whine. He laughs.

“ _Something funny to you, trainee_?” He asks you, soft and dangerous and smiling, and the  _crack_ hits your ears a second in advance, before you feel it. You know what’s coming you  _know_  and you squeeze your eyes shut and gasp, wait for—for— _fuck_ yes, the sting is so deep down to your bones and all of a sudden laughing is  _so_  much less important than the throb in your aching-full nook and all your messiahs couldn’t stop you from squirming and writhing around in his lap, pinned, desperate as all fuck. “ _You find some_ mirth _in all this_?”

“ _Unnhh_ —!” you say instead of begging, because as you open your mouth to do just that he draws back his hand and hits you again, a sharp, killing sting that goes right to the center of you like lightning. You can’t stop laughing in between your tight little wanting noises, either, you just writhe and laugh and moan and whimper and he strokes your ass with the tips of his long, long claws.

“All this time and you ain’t taking me  _seriously_ ,” he growls,  _SMACK_ , he’s hitting so good and hard, none of the too-light little teasing swats he likes to start you out on and everything is so good,  _so good, so close…_

He hits you one last time and you shake yourself all to pieces.

He holds you there, pets your back kinda absent-like while you come back down again. He didn’t actually hurt you, not too much, you didn’t make it up to that floating spot in your pan where things are all being done to you and you’re just floating and feeling and babbling without too much care for what your body does. You figure this is more just…you’re tired. You’re still  _real_ fuckin’ tired. 

“…do we gotta get up?” You start to say, and at that exact moment he pats you on the nug and says “…fuck it, let’s get back in the slime. You got nowhere to be?”

“Gonna go see Karkat sometime during holy week,” you say—you’re still all laid out across his lap and he’s messing at your back and your ass with the tips of his claws, but as you are right this second it just makes you purr, maybe twitch up a little when he tickles. “…not now.”

“Then back to sleep,” he says, and when he starts to move this time you make yourself slide off him before he can pick you up, and you stand over him and hold out a hand to him. 

He looks at you surprised. Then he looks at you thinking. Then he takes your hand and gets to his feet as well, and you stand under the water for a second or two, just looking at each other. 

Something goes unsaid, just then—you don’t know what it is, not exactly, but you tell him…something. And he accepts it, for all the fucking good that does you, you not knowing what it is exactly you wanted to say. But you walk back together still all covered in water, get right back in the slime together with your skin stinging from his hand and your knee tucked up between his where it makes him twitch, you know now, to feel your leg brush up on his nook. You decide what’s said and understood, and you go back to sleep a little different from what you were when you got up. Still good. But not quite just the same all up in the insides of you.

You figure that’s best and for good, and you dream you’re in a place of tents and mirth under a black sky and cloth like rainbows, dream you’re settled in the dark carnival with a hand wrapped up in yours.

(You can’t turn to look whose hand is in yours, and when you wake up you wonder if it was warm or cold)

(You can’t quite remember.)

\--

It’s the third day of the week of all colors, and there are heretics on your ship.

You woke up in a good mood, dozed in and out for a while until Gamzee started getting squirrely and had to go and get up and join in the celebrating and talk to his congregation of little trainee faithful and ping his moirail (ugh) and keep practicing with his clubs and messiahs only know what else. You got no real business to attend to, for once--the empress knows better than to ask the church of the messiahs to do any business for her on the week of all colors. Her blue and teals and her shitblood cavalreapers, they’ll have to deal without you and yours for now. You get to be as lazy as you fucking well want to be.

You only finally shift your glutes because a few hours after Gamzee gets up and goes--by your reckoning, anyway--somebody pounds on the door. You’re up and out of the slime at least, sitting around sketching in charcoal and daubs of some really nice, pure yellow blood you culled a few sweeps ago and been saving for a special occasion. Your paint is fresh and clean. Your hair still tied up on the back of your head from your second ablution this evening. You’re feeling motherfucking  _great._

“ _KURLOZ,_ “ howls the person who knocked. “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!”

There are only two trolls in the whole galaxy who know you by that name. You roll your eyes, cap the bottle of blood and seal it off, and get up to go to the door.

The empress is not all decked up in her normal royal manner either; weirdest shit, but her hair's all done up braids and tied up behind her head, almost tamed. You glare at her anyway, because right there behind her is Vantas, hanging on Gamzee. Gamzee’s explaining all-colors to him, looks happy as fuck.

You glare at Meenah and she winks at you. You do not wink back.

“The  _fuck_  do you want,” you ask, not a trace of respect, and she just giggles at you.

“Came over to get some sweet party vibes,” she says, and like the universe is all to make her point for her, someone goes racing past behind them trailing ribbons in all colors. A red one whips Vantas in the face; he makes disgusted noises at the rusty smear it leaves behind. You snort. He glares at you just as poisonous as you were just glarin’ at Meenah a second ago. “Boring as all shell over on my ship, and Karcrabby all  _pining_  for his moirail and all.” She looks you up and down and raises an eyebrow. “...buuuuut I guess you were all raydy for a day in?”

“Fuck you,” you say on principal, and then tug the tie off your hair and shake it out, pull your gauntlets out of your sylladex and put them on. Still not the full and mighty mirthful regalia, but due enough for a holiday. More than enough to make Vantas’s shoulders tense up. “Since when you got an interest in  _clownfish business_? We had a couple  _hundred_  all-colors without you pokin’ your nub in.”

She waves you off with a  _pssshhhh_. Vantas is still blushing from that “ _pining”_  dig, but he looks to you like he’s wonderin’ the same thing. You don't hardly ever see them together--those filthy shitblood mutant fronds on Gamzee's precious face--and seeing them here now, Gamzee all leaning down to nuzzle up at his hair, it makes your fingers ache for your clubs. He doesn’t want to be here. You don’t  _want_  him here. Your good humor is fast retreating from you.

“Welcome aboard the holy fleet,” you purr at him, and bare your fangs at him, all but friendly. “ _Vantas._ “

“So glad to  _fucking be here_ ,” he says, bitter as grey steel, and you can tell he takes the threat the exact way you mean it. But he’s got guts--he doesn’t back down. Instead he reaches up, never looks away from you, and puts his hand at Gamzee’s horns. You expect a flinch--one of those precious, painful little shudders that you love and hate.

But Gamzee doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t shake--he makes a little, breathy noise, presses up to Vantas’s hot hand. “-- _Karkat,_ “ he says, really quiet, his voice so  _open_ , like that's all Vantas has to do to reach right down to the core of him. “--th-thought you said--”

“Oh,” says Vantas, and doesn’t look away from you. “...you’re right, we talked about that, didn’t we? Fuck man, sorry. Forgot what I was doing.”

“I mean,” says Gamzee, and grins at him, all soft and hopeful,  _fuck_. “...if you  _wanna_ do rubs right now, I’m so motherfuckin’ up for--”

His fingers barely touch Vantas’s horns, but you see him go reddish about the cheeks and ears and sway.

“--no,” he says, and it squawks a little on the end. “--okay, that rule still stands, hands off right now, okay?”

“Aw.” Gamzee leans down, not a touch embarrassed, and lays a delicate little kiss on each nubby little horn. Vantas squeaks. You get the tiniest jolt of a feeling from that, pale and tender as all fuck. Then you think about who’s getting those little sweet pieces of gentleness, who he’s spawned of. You frown.

“Hey, Clamzee,” says Meenah, and Gamzee looks up at her and nods--or bows, a little bit. Wriggler does try for manners, for the empress. You think he’s a little scared of her. It’s cute as fuck, how embarrassed he gets.

You thought once that you wouldn’t want her there beyond a kiss or two, but you wonder what he would do, how he would look if you--

“Sure!” Gamzee’s voice jolts you out of your thinking--which is good, because your thoughts were wandering too far and too fast for this time of the afternoon. You weren’t listening to what Meenah was talking to him about, but he’s darting forward down the hallway, all skinny legs and bright grins. He half-turns, looking back at you. “Oh--hey, Kur--uh--”

"...go on,” you tell him, and when he smiles back at you, fuck, he looks so goddamn  _glad._  You are truly torn; on the one hand, your pusher twisting when he looks at you that way, and on the other the memory burned into your pan of how Vantas watched you, reaching into the deepest heart of him  _so easy_. “...current company, I figure you can call me whatever the fuck you want. Little one.”

His ears go purple to the tips. Vantas’s eyes open a little wider; he can’t look at either of you or at the way Gamzee smiles at you. “...Kurloz,” Gamzee repeats, finally, soft. Then he pulls himself back to the moment. “--can we go to the chapel first, I want to show 'em the rainbows, that’s not a sin, right?”

It is, a little. The only reason blood like Vantas’s should be in there, the only reason even disbeliever blood like Meenah’s should be there, would be to paint the walls and the altar. But he looks so much alight and you see no reason not to show Vantas a little church terror.

“...show them the rainbows,” you tell him, and he whoops and darts over to grab your hand. You and Vantas both get tugged off after him--but you’ve got longer legs by far and you just have to take a stride a touch longer than normal. Vantas almost gets pulled off his feet. The four of you head off into the dark together, into the distant sound of music and mirth.

\--

This is the best fucking all-colors  _ever._  Karkat’s hand is all warm in one of yours and Kurloz’s is big and rough and cold in the other one, and you think maybe later tonight you can get him to teach you some more ways to feel gentle and not scared, maybe even rub your horns for you.

Karkat’s thumb is all rubbing up and down your knuckles, and there’s a little spark of confusion in the core of you because on the other side Kurloz trails his claws over your skin enough to sting and prickle and make you twitch.

You go past one of the big halls and stop for a second; there are rainbow lights hung up, people dancing, hymns and culling chants and fights in clapping, yelling circles. Cloths of every color on every wall. It’s motherfuckin’ gorgeous. Kurloz hums low in his chest, and when you look up at him he looks content and pleased and tender like he only ever does when he looks out over his congregation. You squeeze his hand and he glances down and squeezes back. On your other side, Karkat mumbles something.

“Say again, little Vantas?” says Kurloz, and Karkat snarls a little under his breath at  _little._  You gotta laugh--he is little, sure enough, even next to you, and next to Kurloz he’s tiny. “You got somethin’ to add to this, all our holy motherfucking mirth not getting you?”

“I  _said_ , that’s a hell of a lot of clowns,” says Karkat, and you hold out a hand and get a righteous high-five as two of your sisters sprint past, spinning and laughing and stealing dizzy kisses. Karkat has to jump aside. “--fuck!”

“This is only half the faithful fleet,” says Kurloz, and you know the sounds of his voice well enough now that you can pick out his tone--he’s showing off a little bit. Well, he got reason to. The fleet is a thing of motherfuckin’ glory. “Job and a half to rule, sometimes.”

“Ain’t got it as good as me,” says the empress, and socks the old man on the arm. He grumbles and bumps her back. “--but if there’s anemoneone in the galaxy who gotta work as hard as I do, it’s this old angler.”

You grin real big to hear how badass he is because  _fuck_ yes he rules the whole thing and he does  _awesome_ \-- “Yeah,” says Karkat, cool, and picks at his claws instead of looking up. “Yeah, right, sure he’s earned everything he’s got, worked really hard for it.”

Kurloz half-turns, and he’s still smiling but you don’t think it’s the same smile now, somehow. It’s tighter. Strangely sweeter.

“...And I do have motherfucking plenty,” he says, “...through messiahs’ blessing.”

“Amen,” you speak up on the heels of the words--that’s a call and response as got beat hard into your pan since your first day onboard. Kurloz glances back at you, messes up your hair and gives you his softest smile, less tight and less sweet, warmer and sharper.

Karkat is watching you both, and his eyebrows are all low and tight. You consider that you might go over and try to smooth the scowl off his face, but you’re on the other side of your matesprit and there’s not too much room to get around him. “... _and you think you deserve everything you’ve got?_ “ He asks, strange and quiet for him. “How much do you think you  _actually_  have? “

Kurloz stops in his tracks and turns--you keep walking a few seconds without noticing, then almost slam into the empress as she turns back as well and watches, raising up her eyebrows. When you turn back around, your matesprit and your moirail are staring at each other.

“I got a hold on things you won’t ever touch, at the very least, little mutant-blood,” Kurloz purrs, and steps right up in his space, leaning down over him and blocking out his light. Things ain’t so friendly anymore all of a sudden, you can feel the air hum a little with his harshwhimsy and you are confused and unhappy with this sudden change. “I got a hold on things we share, just as much as you, but when you’re gone and fucking rotted,  _I’ll still be holding on_.”

“If anything can  _survive_  your-- _hold_ ,” Karkat spits, and Kurloz’s smile drops. He looks cold as ice-stars all of a sudden, all full-up with messianic rage, and they were smiling at each other just a second ago, what the fuck is going on? “If you don’t  _destroy_  everything you put your hands on!”

“ _I don’t give what’s not wanted and deserved,”_ Kurloz snarls, all his friendly smiles gone. “I take greater motherfucking care than you ever will! I  _protect_  what’s  _MOTHERFUCKING MINE!!_ “

“Yeah?!” Karkat isn’t being humble and quiet, not this time, he’s standing right up as tall as he can, and he barely still comes up to Kurloz’s stomach but he stands like they’re equal. “You did a great fucking job of that when he got  _captured and tortured_!!”

You actually see your matesprit flinch, and you feel shitty about it but you’re too confused to say a word. This is a whole different thing now, is he--he’s talking about you? When’d they start talking about you?

“ _At least while I’m here I can make him feel good,_ “ says Karkat, hisses it at him, all quiet and venom, “-- _without scaring the shit out of him._ “

The empress whistles long and low, and you’re so busy staring, horrified at Karkat for saying a thing so cruel and horrified at Kurloz for the look on his face, like he’s riled for murder, you hardly even jump when she puts an elbow on your shoulder and leans on you.

“Okay,” she says, as Karkat actually growls, out loud and angry, and Kurloz’s shoulders tense, his bare arms all lean and rippling. “...that shit be hot as glub.”

“Uh,” you say, and then you yelp and kind of dive forward, because Kurloz reaches down, really calm, picks Karkat up by the front of his uniform, and slams him up against the wall with his feet dangling off the ground. “Whoa, whoa, hey!”

“You loathsome fucking piece of  _shit_ ,” says Karkat, and Kurloz snarls an inch from his face.

You don’t know who leans forward first, but all of a sudden your matesprit is making out with your palemate and you have basically all lost complete track of what the holy  _fuck_  is going on.

They bite and claw and snarl at each other, and you can see the way they’re biting each other up hurts pretty good--good to  _you._  But they don’t look like they’re enjoying it and you know for all the old man loves to give pain he ain’t any more keen than any other troll on getting it. He doesn't go as far as he does with you, but it’s clear he could do more. Like he  _wants_  to do more. Like if you leave him alone he’ll do something terrible some night, and all of a sudden like the ground dropping from under you, you realize you don’t trust him not to do something to your palemate one day that can’t be fixed. Not with then snarling and tearing each other’s mouths like that, not with his claws set into Karkat’s throat and slowly, slowly squeezing--

Then Karkat grabs him by the ear and  _hauls_  and Kurloz gives a snarling cry all pained and angry and drops him. You rush for Karkat when he hits the ground, but then you see Kurloz holding on the side of his head and baring his teeth, the twist of pain on his face, and you stop between the two of them and just kind of

You just sort of

You stand there and stare at each of them, one to the other, one to the other, and as soon as you think of going to one you look back at the other one and  _fuck_  Karkat is bleeding that miraculous red and standing funny on one leg and Kurloz has purple dripping down the side of his face and

and

They notice you at the same moment, when they try to glare at each other and you’re in the way. The anger changes to something fierce and sweet and you are truly and completely motherfuckin’ torn, you couldn’t pick one over the other if you tried.

“Stop hyperventilating, you panleak, you’re working yourself up again,” says Karkat.

“Little brother, please don’t you even look at me like that,” says Kurloz.

They stop. They glare.

“Don’t do that,” you ask, not sure who you’re asking--both of them, maybe, or fuck, maybe you’re just sending up a prayer right now. “I--the both of you, like, you don’t even fucking know, you’re--I’m--” you can’t make words do what you want, not when it’s really important, when you really need them. You move your mouth around words that don’t make any sense, and look from one to the other one and hope like hell, hope you never have to see the two people you are the most about in the whole fucking galaxy tearing each other up like that again.

They look at you, then at each other, then back at you again, and there’s a moment where everyone stands really still.

Then Karkat slowly goes slumped.

“...no,” he says. “...the fuck this is going to turn out like  _in which two stable quadrants are pulled into a vacillating web of violence and turmoil when the main character’s red quadrants force her to abandon her happiness to mediate between them._  I’m not being troll Sean Connery, I don’t give a fuck how hot he is--”

“What the  _fuck_  are you talking about?” Kurloz rumbles, and Karkat opens his mouth to yell and then looks at you. Back at Kurloz.

“...I’m saying,” he says, delicate-like, “...that you’re pulling your...matesprit...into a spot where he feels like he has  _no fucking choice_  but mediating between us. I don’t know about you, but I like my pale quadrant the way it is.”

Kurloz frowns at him for another second longer--and then his eyes go wide.

“Fuck,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“What--?”

“Shoosh, Gamzee,” says Karkat over top of you, in his  _listen-the-fuck-up-to-what-I’m-telling-you_  voice. He never takes his eyes off Kurloz. “...we’ll figure this out on our own. Like  _civilized trolls_. Won’t we?”

Kurloz bares fang at him. Karkat has a face that looks made of stones, it moves so little. They stare for a good half a minute, and then Kurloz glances at you and huffs out a sigh.

“Yeah,” he says--to you, not Karkat. “...we got this, little one.”

Karkat twitches, but he don’t say a word against it and you could just fall the fuck over for thankfulness. They step away from you and walk a few steps--a few steps for Kurloz. He grins to watch Karkat jog after him and you are helped but uneasy. You sit back. You watch. You wait.

\--

“If you ever get a single thought in your head,” growls the Grand Highblood, and  _fuck him_ , he gets down onto one knee to look you in the eyes. You can see it in his eyes, in the intensity of his voice—he means this. You can see it when Gamzee smiles at him—he means this. Some part of that ancient, rotting husk of a soul is cracked open and red as your blood and you  _loathe_  the honesty of the protective pity in his eyes. “…if you ever push him that he owes you something, if you make out to him that he should be  _anything but what he fucking is_  to please you—you will never.  _Never._  Get near him again.”

\--

“If you ever force him to stay away from his quadrants because  _you fucking disapprove,_ ” hisses the filthy little mutant, and he leans into your glare, bares all his fangs like he would  _fight_  you. At the very least, you are respecting of that. You are fucking  _expecting_  of that. If he wasn’t willing to fight for Gamzee, he shouldn't have him at all. “…if you try to  _own_  him just because for some godforsaken reason he fucking  _pities_  you, you deserve to have him look at you ever night of the rest of your ungodly fucking long life and you deserve to see how much you  _hurt_ him. You sick, ancient, controlling  _trash._ ”

\--

“You just had to go and break that up,” sighs the empress, and leans on you. You sway a little bit and then remember who she is and what’s going on and your face turns hotter. “Been a while since I saw anyone who wasn’t me gettin’ Kurloz up on high tide. Maaan, look at him, all bubblin’ up pitch…” she looks at you, and her eyes are even older than Kurloz’s, even colder and stranger to you. You shiver under them. “…you don’t ever want to sea them hurt, huh?” she says. “Not by brinyone.”

You remember the two of them snarling at each other, the two of them bleeding, the two of them clawing into the spots that hurt each other, not just flesh but tearing at each others’ souls—

“No,” you say, and that’s all you can get out, because the thought has sucked all the air out of you. You hate that this is happening and you hate that it feels like it might be all your fault. “No.”

“Can’t kelp it, just want all the hurt in the universe on you instead.” She pats your head. “…you and pain, sweir to cod, I ain't ever gonna undersand that silt. Simmer down, little Clamzee, I’ll get him good and distracted.”

“What?”

She winks at you. For a second, really vivid and clear and bright, you’re back in Kurloz’s lap listenin’ to the little noises of their kisses and bites and really  _really_  fuckin’ distracted by how soft her rumble spheres are all pressed in your face. Your insides seize up warm and hungry for a second. You. Want to know. How she plans on distracting him. You don’t want to see him hurt but you want to see him with that same dark burn in him as you see for a second in hers.

"Yeah," you say, and it comes out kind of hoarse and weird and not quite like your own voice--all knotted and tangled-like in your squawk blister. "...do my motherfucking best to clam down. Uh. Prawnmise."

She laughs and does a mess of work in your hair--ain't ever under control, but it don't really need more hands at work messing it up either. When you try to jerk out from under her hand, though, you come up short; her fingers have close up. She won't let you turn your face from her. The smile is fading out of her eyes, all bright and bright and so purple they're almost red, and she watches you like as she's planning where to bite first when she eats you entirely.

“… _you do look a lot like him_ ,” she says, low and smooth and dark like the fucking  _ocean_ , and her fingers wind up in your hair and stroke across your skin. A second ago you were joking and talking and she smiled at you but now even more even than Kurloz, there’s something about her being gentle like that that makes you shake and makes you tense up like you’re about to fight. Feels like being in the water and something touching your legs, playing at winding around your ankles. Like the gentle is going to drag you down and drown you. Like she wouldn’t ever get tired of tormenting you this way—

“Meenah, the fuck?”

You jump and realize that you’re staring at her with your mouth hanging open, breathing harder and shaking a little. She’s smirking at you with all white shark teeth, and you feel like a pan-dead idiot for just sitting there and getting knocked gaping by her hands. Kurloz and Karkat are back, tense all over and frowning but both of them frowning at the empress now, not at each other.

“I have to respectfully agree, your Imperious Condescension,” says Karkat, and Meenah giggles. “—what the  _fuck_? Ma’am?”

“Just playin’ around,” she says, sing-song and all full of glee, “…just playin’ around, Kurlz. He’s cute when he’s blushing.” She turns that look at him instead, and he all stands up straight and blinks at her, confused. “ _Can’t pool me with your dumbass clowny makeup_ ,” she whispers, loud and echoey, “… _you and me we both know Makaras be easy as fuck like that._ ”

You recall how his cheeks colored when you took his paint off, when he watched you begging, when he came. How easy your face turns hot under your paint so you feel like it’ll get running and melting and it’ll be dripping off you. Kurloz has a face like a thundercloud.

“I swear to every most motherfucking holy—”

“Come on,” says the empress brightly, and she whisks right past you with a flick of her hair and a sway in her hips (god wow, you love seein’ your matesprit naked, all of his hard shapes and planes and corners, but that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate,  _fully_  appreciate, a figure that’s all rounds and curves and softnesses. If there is a single thing you mourn it’s the tragic not-having of any rumble spheres in this relationship. “Show me those super-speshell rainbow chapelican of yours. And if I’m  _reeeeel_  good, I'm making an imperial decree you gotta let me bend you over the altar and show off dat bass!”

You think you get how she’s going to distract him, you figure, kind of dazed as she sets off and Kurloz sets after to yell at her, growling in the pit of his thorax and hands all tight up at his sides. The only question is if there’s going to be a single motherfucker lucky enough to survive.


	8. Don't Hurt Him

Gamzee has his second mission less than a week later.  
  
Comes down from the empress, and you are torn up furious with her for giving him a mission special when she knows what happened last time and you are craven and glad because it’s an easy clean-up, and this time they know this is so for certain. He’ll be in hardly more danger there than he will on your ship. Five shitblood leaders, she says, and they’ll be right there for easy picking. She’ll even send him some help.  
  
That help is little mutant Vantas, and you are seething again.  
  
You get nothing done the week he is away, for fucking  _worrying_ like a troll a hundredth of your age. You get the reports, and they ease your pan some little bit; the first one goes down, throat slit. Second one the same minute, neck snapped. You see the reports as they go out to the rest of what little security these little crawling dirt-bloods still have. They’re in the palm of your hand, you watch another two vanish, broken necks, and then Vantas kills the final one. Their heads will be in the streets the night after, and your boy and his moirail are off into the hills, onto their shuttle and gone.  
  
They come back to you, for all Vantas obviously ain’t keen to step foot with you so much as he wants to go back to Meenah and give her report. Gamzee’s got a bandaged-up arm, one broke-ass finger and a handful of bruises. Vantas has a big stab wound in his shoulder and you’re gonna fuck with him about it until Gamzee tells you all excited how his best friend dived in front of that last guy’s pike and held on with both hands while Gamzee got around close to break his neck, and then you ain’t got a leg to stand on there. You hate that you owe Vantas for that wound. Hate that it would be on Gamzee and he stopped it from being there, hate that every time you catch yourself thinkin’ over,  _shouldn’t anybody else be protecting him but me_ , his voice slinks back into your pan— _you sick, ancient, controlling_ trash.  
  
You ask him instead if you can have some of his blood to paint with, and he looks sick and utterly motherfuckin’ freaked and that restores up some of your good humor.   
  
“—can use it down in the chapel,” you say, and show all your teeth not quite as a smile. “Got some painting to do down there yet, don’t we, little one?”  
  
“Oh yeah!” He says, and you recall as what distracted you from that before—happy thought. Greatly appreciated. You grin, more real this time. “Yeah, we did get our talk on with that, huh? But—don’t think we ever…got hashed out what we were gonna do.” His ears are purple. You know he remembers too, and you know Vantas is clamping down his maw tight on everything he wants to say.   
  
“Easy to get distracted sometimes,” you say, smooth and warm, and wave it off. “And outside heroics and blood-lettin’ and all? Give me the lowdown, brother.”  
  
He tells you the whole thing, and Vantas just has to stand there, not tense enough to stand at attention, not at peace enough to relax, as you prompt Gamzee and shape his story and get him to tell it to you the long way around just to watch his face lit up and to watch Vantas fidget.   
  
“—and he said I could come here first,” he finishes. His voice drops a little—his shoulders draw up. “…just wanted to give you a sight with oculars all your own,” he says, kinda soft. “So’s you knew I wasn’t…”  
  
He trails off. Your pusher squeezes on you like it only ever does seem to do for him, and you don’t even think on Vantas bein’ there when you lean forward and smile at him.   
  
“C’mere.”  
  
He comes forward, puts his arms around you and you both hold on for a few long seconds, breathe together. You can feel the muscles all tight and thin like cords in his arms, you can feel his hands clench up tight and loose and tight again on the back of your shirt, you can feel him turn his head a little and put his face in your neck and breathe into your hair. You pull back and kiss him real quick and sweet, bite his lip and let him go.   
  
“Thanks, little one,” you tell him, and he ducks his head down and grins and knocks his horns up against yours. “Not bad, second time?”  
  
“Pretty motherfucking awesome,” he says, and you dig the rounds of your fingertips into his bruises on one shoulder to watch his eyes fall shut and his mouth fall open so bruised and sweet. “—pretty,” he mumbles, losing track, voice all rambling, and his breath hitches when you knead those little painted stains on his skin. “Pretty awesome  _mmh—_ “  
  
Vantas clears his throat. Gamzee jumps and pulls back, but he’s still all breathing a little harder than before, he’s still got eyes so big and dark and you’ll have him for yourself later. The relief of your nerves is a pointed and pressing concern to nerves elsewhere, and you wonder what would happen if you straighten that finger for him, what he’s got under that bandaged-up arm that you could dig your fingers into and what sounds he would make in response. You might leave scars, but scars are fucking badass, shows you got hurt (and everyone fucking does, especially your brothers and sisters all running in headlong with their clubs high and their eyes bright) but you lived and you took it like a badass motherfucker. You’ve already left scars on him with your own teeth and your own claws—it shouldn’t be too much of a hardship on either of you if you take the thing that some shitblood gone and done to him and you bend it into your own mark on him.  
  
(You think on a sharp blade, on inks and cuts and the designs you could make on his body, the way you could all change scars into not just prizes and story-bait, but art too. You think of lines of purple blood on his back and the thin white lines of them after they heal, making patterns of your hurt on him.)  
  
(You get a tight little jolt from your worn-up old corpse that if you keep on this trail of thought you’re gonna have no fucking choice but throw him over something and put a few scars on right there and then.)  
  
(You quit.)  
  
(For now.)  
  
“Karkat’s got to go back now, though,” Gamzee is saying, and you get a jolt of pleasure wholly different and grin at Vantas.   
  
“Oh,” you say, sweet and sad as a motherfucking sin. “The biggest motherfuckin’ pity.”  
  
“I’m practically fucking inconsolable,” Vantas says at you, bitter and dry, and you chuckle and sit back up. Gamzee glances from one of you to the other and chews on his lip unhappily. You notice. See Vantas notice. You two look at each other.  
  
“…get back safe then,” you tell him, and lean back in your throne and cross your arms. “Figure you can handle that without messing anything up.”  
  
“I’ll make it a  _divine mission_ ,” he snarks back at you, but the advice of concern took him by surprise, for all you both know you only said it for the sake of your matesprit and for the empress. It’s a little victory. You do your most level of bests not to feel good about that, because you got no reason to hunger victory over him. Not this little mutant nothing you could crush with one hand.  
  
“Blessings and good humor,” you say, and you wave him off, so he knows he’s dismissed. Gamzee looks at you strange, and you know what’s got him—that’s a church blessing. He looks suspicious. You smile at him. Nobody doing nothing here.   
  
“Oh,” Vantas says. “Funniest thing you’ve ever said,  _old man_.”  
  
He goes. You look after him, think let that sink in good and deep, the disrespect, the insult at your sense of humor of all most fucking blasphemous insults, the pretend almost-calm he took at your offenses. You fucking hate the kid. But the more he looks you fearless in the eyes the more some bit of you settles grudging into  _liking_  him. The horrible little shit. He’s got hella motherfuckin’ globes.  
  
“Gonna go see him off,” says Gamzee, and ducks back, real quick, leans up and kisses you on the cheek. He grins at you as he turns back, and you don’t understand the first fucking thing that is happening in his leaky-ass thinkpan but you get the feeling he thinks you did good. He’s glad you didn’t come to blows again. He is not making your slide into blasphemous liking of his mutant freak palemate any harder.   
  
You don’t  _need_  his approval on any thing whatsoever, you’re a goddamn ruler for fuck’s sake, but that don’t mean you don’t enjoy it.   
  
You’ll enjoy it even more later this morning, when you get him back to your block and try some of your good, sharp knives on him. You’ll wipe out what was done to him by other hands and make it yours. And with that thought can you settle back, and smile, and wait.  
  
\--  
  
Kurloz fucks you up real good in all best and holiest motherfucking ways after your second mission, and you figure he’s feeling as what you’re feeling—fear ain’t a thing as should be familiar to the church, but you were properly fucking terrified, going out again. Having Karkat there was a blessing of every best sort, especially as when he told the ship where it was supposed to go on the way back, left it fly itself and came back to curl up with you instead.   
  
Karkat's fear was his hands on the places they hurt you, fixing up—on your face, soothing out those jitters that hit you after you get in a real good fight, on the rest of you when he helped you up and you used all the ship’s hot water together cleaning off blood and sweat and muck. Kurloz’s fear was a cold knife and lines of fire on your skin, tying you back to him, marking you all over as something he’ll fight for, someone he’ll protect. And both of them made you cry like a fucking wriggler, which ain’t a thing you’re particular proud of, but the way they both soothe and touch when you do doesn’t do much to stomp it out, is all. You ain’t seen Karkat so red in all his life as you did when he kissed your tears and held onto you and promised all shaky and half out of his head he’d take good care of you. Never stop, take care of you for the rest of his life, and you clung on and couldn't stop fucking crying.   
  
And that was a hell of a time and you could stand to try a few more missions if your reward from messiahs both is to get off real good in both your quadrants afterwards. But now you find yourself headed back to Kurloz’s throne room again and it ain’t for a pailing at all. You figure you’re gonna do as best you can to make it so, because you got “an appetite bigger than fucking space” (Kurloz says, and makes big noise about how old he is and how you’re wearing him out and then drags you off to the slime and just ends up getting you off there instead). But he just asked you here to take a look at what he cut up yesterday. You got wounds in shape of your symbol on your neck, like his claim lying heavy and hot on your skin, and you got angels and skulls and symbols of the holy church. Shit is hot as all fuck, thinking of how you've got those marks sunk right into your skin.  
  
So when you push the door open and close it behind you real careful, just to keep out what as might disturb you while you get your real sneaky sexy workings on, and then you turn around and he  _ain’t fucking there_ —  
  
Frustrating don’t begin at covering it. Actually makes you whine out loud, all those sweet thoughts coming up to a stop in your pan at the sight of his throne all empty. He got things to do, right, you know that, but he asked at you,  _be here_  and now  _he_  ain’t and that shit is mightily fucking unfair.   
  
You drag yourself up to his throne, lonesome and abandoned as fuck, and you’re just looking up at it and thinking about him on it, about maybe if you just…climb up there and sit down for a sec and…get your pants off, real quick, because you been thinking on this for  _hours,_ right—  
  
The door opens.   
  
You jump like a guilty wriggler and step back like you weren’t ever even  _contemplating_  on getting off on his throne while he wasn’t there, at all, but it ain’t his shape as comes through the door. It’s smaller, smaller by far, still taller enough to you that you know it’s a full adult but nowhere near Kurloz’s height. It’s small and it’s round and as it comes through the door you see great, tall, arching horns and a great cloud of hair following—  
  
Oh.   
  
It’s the empress.  
  
She ain’t got Karkat with her this time. For some reason, that gets your guts all tight up inside you. Good or bad, you can’t really find it in you to be sure. She comes up towards you too, grins at you like she’s real happy to see you and a lot of shit is happening in your pan, warning noises and things tickling up your spine. You think on stepping back away from her, but—there’s no reason for that. Right? “Dunno where Kurloz—” you start, and she shakes her head before the words all even get on out of you.   
  
“He’ll show up,” she says, and she reaches out and runs her finger down the corner of your jaw. You feel her claws prickle against your pusher’s pulse in your throat and pull away sharp and breathless. She laughs at you. “Twitchy, aintcha?”  
  
“What the actual motherfucking hell,” you ask her, too plain and so fucking confused. She purses up her lips and glubs at you.  
  
“Rude,” she says, and she walks right past you and up to your ancestor’s throne. You…don’t want her there. Don’t want her sitting there. You got a work to do, all of a sudden, not to snarl at her to get away from it, which is fucking  _dumb_  because she’s the damned  _empress_. She can sit wherever the hell she likes.   
  
She doesn’t though—just turns back to you and grins. “Hey, come and sit up here and let me get a look,” she says, and she beckons you, all sharp, queen-as-fuck arrogance. “…clam on. I wanna sea how much you look like him.”  
  
She keeps saying that,  _you look like him_ , and you remember the way she came up to him on his throne, all swaying and dangerous-soft and grinning and the way she kissed him and you feel—  
  
You don’t rightly know. You ain’t scared, but it’s close. Ain’t pissed off, but it’s close.   
  
You come up past her and sit down in his throne and look down on her, and she looks at you again like she just wants to eat you whole.  
  
“…silts you pretty good,” she says, and she comes up and stands in front of you, real close, too close. Your bulge was already considering real clear and sharp the idea of coming out for some attention—she looks you hard and dark and right into your eyes and you pull your legs together and huddle down like she’s not gonna notice how hot your ears are and how you can feel yourself violet right down your neck. “…take your paint off.”  
  
 _That_  gets you jumped right up in your seat. “Fuck no!” You blurt out before you think and she laughs at you and shakes her head.  
  
“Whale,” she says, “I figured as much.”  
  
And then she kisses you.  
  
She’s cold, is the first thing that hits you, before your pan can even figure what’s happening. She’s colder even than you, so cold you’d feel a brother or sister like that and figure them for dead,  _corpse_  cold. She tastes of salt as Kurloz does, but it’s stronger and deeper and it’s _colder_ , like the seawater after a storm—the times when it whipped up from the ocean’s deepest pits and washed up old bones. Dead seasalt as doesn’t ever see moonlight.   
  
Then you stop thinkin’ about the particular tastes of salt, because she sticks her tongue right in your mouth, not so much as  _do you fucking please_  and you put a foot in her stomach without a thought of her royal blood or what could come on your head from denying her, and shove her off of you.  
  
She just laughs.  
  
“Squirmy littoral wriggler,” she says. You growl at her and then stop your growling. You want her to kiss you again. You want to kick her again. You want Kurloz. You don’t want Kurloz here in any way whatsofuckingever because what if he’s pissed with you for kissing her, and you want to go and drop into your slime, because goddamn but it’s late and you are too tired to deal with this bizarre backwards-ass shit right now. She leans forward on the arms of his throne and you keep your eyes on her face because if you look down you’re gonna get a face full of rumble spheres and you’re gonna fucking embarrass yourself, you just know it. “ _You wanna kiss me again_ ,” she says, and her voice is too quiet and too close and you fucking  _do_ , goddammit. She takes a sniff of you and  _licks her lips_  and her eyes are so bright. “ _I can_ smell _it on you._ ”  
  
Fucking hell. Some part of your pan, devoted like as it ever has been, starts up a prayer of deliverance for your soul, because you’re gonna need it. The rest of you makes a croaky noise and tries to stop smelling like you want to kiss her again, because that ain’t a thing you figure you really want to smell like, what if somebody else gets their sniff on? Could stir up some wicked shit.  
  
And then as you’re zoned out, she reaches down and she gets her hand around both your wrists and slams them up above your head and you’re stuck there as sure as shackles, your weight is half-hanging on her hand and she doesn’t shift an inch. Your pan spins from the sudden change of circumstances all happening up in your business, but the rest of you makes a chokey noise and turns purple all over. (All that subjugglator training, all those fights and you finally get pinned and you blush like a wriggler and whimper for her. Fucking incredible.)  
  
“ _Go on_ ,” she says to you. “ _Tell me you don’t want me to. I’ll back off. Wouldn’t want to_ scare _the wriggler, now would we?_ ”  
  
Something hot and vicious is bubbling at you, snapping at your insides—you open your mouth and it comes out a whimper on the back of a growl because you want to  _beg_  but you don’t  _ever_  want to beg to her. Not her, she’s so fucking—she’s just so—  
  
She’s still got your hands pinned, but your legs are just free enough and you get a thigh up in between hers and give a long, hard grind with the boniest stretch of your leg. Her hand on yours twitches, her eyes widen. You’re emperor of the universe.  
  
Then she leans in close and just, like, just rubs her face up alongside yours and flicks her fins and all of a sudden you can’t quite get breathing, you can’t quite stop rolling your hips up against hers, you can’t—you—what the  _fuck—_  
  
“Reelly is a cave-robber,” she sighs, and slips her face into the side of your neck, breathes in deep. “Hardly efin past first drone season? Bet you don’t even get the pheromones he reefs all over the plaice after he’s been glubbing you. He’s too subtle with ‘em. Gotta lay ‘em on till you’re drownin’ before you catch on, yet.” She digs in with her teeth, not hard, not hard enough to distract you—because what? He does? You didn’t? He—  
  
 _Oh,_ fuck that feels  _really good_ and you want to _kill_  her. If this was him, you’d be letting out noises, stupid noises, but there’s something deep in your pan, deeper than how fucking stupid as you know you are, deeper than all the good nature and the holes your sopor left you, deepest down and built into your guts—something tells you  _no_. You don’t roll over and moan for her.   
  
You squeeze your teeth shut and glare at her instead.  
  
“Oh, so  _rebayllious_ ,” she sighs. “Playin’ silent.” She leans in real close at you, grins right in your face and you want to bite her, you should bite her,  _bite her—_  “… _your moray-eel’s real quiet when I fuck him, too._ ”  
  
You got no way of knowing whatever whether she’s spitting lies at you or not but at that smug tone and at that dig at what’s precious and pale to you, what self-control you ever had snaps in two like old bones. You roar and go for her throat and she moves like the fastest and best of subjugglators, steps aside of your jaws and slams you back down. Her grip lifts you almost up off your seat, and you spit curses at her and pull but it’s pointless bullshit, you can’t move her.   
  
“You can try that, yeah _,”_  she says to you, and her grip on your wrists squeezes almost aching, not quite enough, never quite enough. “—better than you have tide though, buoy—if your  _matesprit_ alwaves loses to me you don’t sand a chance.” She stops, considering, thinking long and hard and letting you hang there and try to kick at her—she’s too close and your legs too fucking long, but you give it a shot anyway because not to ain’t a thought you can even entertain right this second. “…we should tie him to somefin’ sometime,” she decides. “…and I can sit back and tell you what to do. Ah—” she holds up a finger warningly when you groan at that and try to tug free of her hands, claw yourself,  _hurt_  yourself, hurt  _her,_   _something_. “Don’t try that, buoy. I’m clamducting an expherringment here.”  
  
You snort and she laughs too, but she don’t seem inclined to let you go and you don’t have the first fucking clue, still, what’s going on.   
  
“Shell me what you want,” she says, and just holds.   
  
“…what—” your mouth’s real dry and your pusher thinks you been sprinting the ship’s length for a few nights straight. You keep the panting and whining and the  _want_  locked up inside, but you ain’t in any way up to keeping your words from going all shaky and going where they please. “…what if I don’t motherfucking—want. Bitch.”  
  
“Mmm…” she thinks on this. “…then I don’t.”  
  
“You let go?”  
  
She shows you her shark teeth. “Maybe. Eventually. Never promised I wouldn’t keep talkin’ at you for a while though, first.”  
  
Fuck.  
  
“… _what if I do_ ,” you ask, and she knows as well as you do that that question’s your answer, she can see it on you and you’re out of your league and out of your depth and you didn’t ever learn how to swim. She lays her fingers light on your chest, slides them down and down and slowly down until you’re twitch-shivering on every inch, strung motherfucking taut with waiting.   
  
“… _what if you do,_ little one _?_ ” she asks at you, right in your ear and mocking at you. “… _what if you do?_ ”  
  
And then she gets her other hand up between your legs and  _squeezes_ —just hard enough to not quite hurt and you feel the edge of her claws and your whole body turns shuddery and hot like that white spot at the middle of a fire. Melting, weak and shivery. Gets your bulge in her pretty painted hands and the fabric’s so rough it almost hurts but  _not quite_ —fucking hell when she gives a little tug it goes right through to the core of you and locks your aeration sponges tight and leaves you gasping. Her eyes are bright on you, her hands are like shackles you couldn’t ever break on your wrists and between your legs and you want her to just  _hurt_  you already and you want to fucking die at the noises she’s forcing out of you and you want her to never stop—  
  
“ _Meenah_ ,” says a voice you know all and well, and every bit of you goes tense like wires and shudders with wanting both at the same time. “ _WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING._ ”  
  
She lets go of you and pulls away, and you’re left gasping, pulling your knees up and together and staring at everything like you been hit hard in the pan—which is about as what feels like happened. Goddamn. You gotten used to the way Kurloz takes you, all like—like an earthquake, he’s so old and so strong, but you’ve forgotten bein’ scared of that. But the empress, she’s like deep water and oceans, killer and cold and fucking batshit up the fucking bell-tower. Holy fucking messiahs.  
  
Kurloz is wearin’ full gear and hair down and club over one shoulder and he looks pissed as hell. He closes the door behind him—locks it up, and for some reason the click when it locks makes you tremble all up and down your thoracic column, your throat seizes up in trying to whine.   
  
“I get you’re swingin’ something darker for me all of a sudden,” says Kurloz, and puts his club away—the empress sits herself down on the arm of his throne next to you and puts a hand on your hair and you’re unexpecting, you jump and shudder. She grabs you by a horn and you growl, but it turns out all little and wobbling and not enough to scare a lowblood grub. It feels so fucking _good_  is the thing, it feels good. You hate her for it.   
  
Kurloz snarls too, considerable louder, and that’s as what you haven’t heard in a while. He is truly riled. All tight up with fury, is your old man. “ _Goin’ all draggin’ him into this, that’s_ motherfucking low,  _Meenah_ ,” he says, and fucking hell you can see it in your pan, you getting off on him just talking at you like that with that snarl under every solitary word like the thunder of the vast honk to come—he sounds so _dangerous_. So deadly and so cruel.   
  
“Doesn’t look like he minds,” says the empress, and she looks down on you and runs cold fingers across your lips and  _everything_  throbs. You make a noise shameful and whimpering. Kurloz glances back at you too. His eyebrows go up. Empress gets herself up and leaves you, and his eyes go back to her as she walks forward, sway of her ass and she rolls her steps like a hunting animal down on the homeworld. You stare at her ass. Then you stare at his. Your nook aches.  
  
When he speaks again, his voice has gone lower, grinding at your bones, and he still sounds so amazing and they look so amazing and you are fucking done with everything. “…your fight is with _me_ ,” he says, and she snorts and rolls her eyes at him. “You don’t go through my family to get to me Meenah,  _we made this accord._ ”  
  
“ _You_  made that accod,” she corrects, and she steps up in his space, makes him look right down to keep his eyes on her. “Maybe you ain’t kelpin’ my finterest quite like you used to, you think of that?”  
  
“I thought of maybe you’ve got too old to want a real rival,” he hisses at her, and that makes her draw up, makes her smile drop some. It’s like porn. You’re watching porn. Air’s so pitch you can’t breathe, hate’s so strong on their faces you can’t move. And just a few weeks ago they were cracking jokes and gettin’ their drink on together like oldest hatefriends, full platonic—maybe even a little pale. “Think maybe you’re lookin’ for easier catches, someone you can fuck with who don’t stand a chance against you. Sick old hag as you motherfucking are.”  
  
“ _Fuck you_ ,” she says, and you make a tiny little noise out of your control and sink down in your seat at how they look on each other.   
  
“ _C’mere,_ ” he snarls back, and when he pulls her up against him she doesn’t just take it like you do, she reaches around and drags her claws good and slow down his back. The noise he makes is a glory. Your mouth is dry.  
  
“ _Too scared to take this outside your block?_ ” the empress shoves and holy shit, he actually _staggers_ , how strong is she? “I’ve known you since you were on trayning clubs,  _little brother,_ I know all your tricks and whelknesses _._ ”   
  
That makes Kurloz snort and then growl and they both snigger for a second before his hand snags in her hair and tugs and she hisses and grinds up against him all slow. Everything down lower than your grubscars twitches at how fucking  _good_  you know that has to hurt, a hand wrenching on your hair and claws in your back and—  
  
Your hand is shaking when you reach down, and before you can even think on how truly monumentally fucking stupid it would be to touch yourself right there in front of them with Kurloz so mighty motherfucking pissed already, a hand grabs hold tight on your wrist.  
  
“ _Don’t touch_ ,” purrs the empress, and she leans her weight forward and pins your fronds down on the sides of Kurloz’s throne. Her knees are up in between yours and you tense up all sudden-like and crook your fingers for claws. She laughs at your threat like she’s seen no cuter fucking thing, and leaves you fucking— _angry_. Why the fuck are you  _angry_ , how dare you even contemplate on anger at her when she’s getting most holy as shit pitch on your matesprit right there in front of you?  
  
Oh.  
  
Your matesprit is right there in front of you.  
  
“Move over,” he rumbles at the empress, and she does move, but only enough she gets behind you, sprawls back in his throne and pulls you over on her. You’re settled on her lap, she’s still got your wrists in her hands, and when you growl she hitches you up and settles you down right on her thigh and rocks you there. You  _feel_  yourself chirp and whimper like a needy wriggler, more than you hear it—your hearing all goes missing for a second.  
  
When you come back into you, Kurloz is in front of you, pressed up between your legs kissing at you, your face and your neck and your shoulders and you kiss back for a second and then dig your claws at his chest and thrash and keen, overshook with it and pan spinning and eyes half-blinded, as she giggles and bounces you on her knee like you’re a fucking  _wriggler._ The toy in your nook hits right up against her knee every time and it hurts, it fucking  _hurts_  and she laughs at you when you gasp out from pleasure of it. (“—so glubbin’ weir-d!”) She drags her claws down you to hear the chirp it tears out of you unwilling, pinches your grubscars to make you jump and laughs at you. When Kurloz first tried you out, pushed you all cautious, trying to figure you out, you felt loved at and held and taken care of. Her it just makes your ears burn and your thorax hum with growls.  
  
“Aw, look at him,” she coos, and her hands go all gentle and cruel, tease down your front so soft you can’t barely feel them but to shiver at their touch. “I don’t think he  _likes_  me much, Kurlz! Guess he takes after you in moray ways than one, huh?”  
  
“That’s ‘cause you’re a hateful bitch,” rumbles Kurloz, but he don’t sound mad—sounds interested all of a sudden. Eyes all dark. “…hey,” he says, and this is at you, you know by the change of his tone, the soft buried in it. His voice is lower, it’s soft and just for you. “… _I can tell her to fuck off,_ ” he tells you, and you laugh all dizzy at the thought of the motherfuckin’ empress herself getting’ told to pack up and fuck off just ‘cause you didn’t want her here. Gods and messiahs how are you between the two most ass-kickingest most bloody-fronded trolls in the galaxy, how does this shit even  _happen_?  
  
Miracles, you figure.  
  
You can’t make to say words, so instead you just grin at him with all your teeth and grind hard at him, and it’s a glory how you get his breath to hitch up a second before he can breathe out.   
  
“… _you asked for it,_ ” he purrs, and kisses you deep and hard enough you have to quit grinning and start gasping. “…put your arms up, little one.”  
  
You do what he tells you. He takes your fronds in his big, rough fingers, bends your arms so they’re crossed over your head—curls your hands each around the other horn so they’re up out of the way, so you’re stretched out in front of him to see.   
  
“You hold on there,” he says to you, and his voice is sweet as murder. “You don’t let go, or I’ll put your hands right back up there and this time I’ll get you lashed tight—tie you up to your own pretty horns and I’ll do some  _powerful cruel work on you_.” He leans in, close enough you feel his breath, you see the thread of purple all ‘round the black pits of his eyes. “… _got it_?”  
  
You nod hard and fast as you can with your arms still up folded over your head and your hands still on your horns, because  _fuck_  yes you got it, you’re gonna follow orders so good, you’re—you— _oh—_ oh—!  
  
“Don’t hurt him,” says the empress behind you, and she leans in and holds you up against her, all soft and pressing at you. Kurloz frowns at her—you whimper a bit at the words, the fucking _cruelty_. “I wanna see how bad he needs it.”  
  
“He ain’t yours, Meenah,” Kurloz snarls over you, but he doesn’t hurt you yet and her hands are so gentle still. “You don’t order how I treat him, you don’t stand in our quadrants, not either of us—”  
  
“Oh come  _prawn_ ,” the empress groans, “Don’t you wanna know?”  
  
He stills a little. Curious now. You start to open your mouth and say something and she pulls something out of her sylladex and jams it into your mouth when you open it, shuts you up tight. You try to bite through on an instinct, not much troll teeth can’t bite through, but it’s leather and metal and made for fangs stronger than yours and you can’t make a dent.   
  
“…do I want to know…what.”  
  
Fuck, fuck  _fuck_.  
  
“Know weather or knot he can come  _without_  you hurting him,” says the empress, right close to your ear and low and slow and vicious, and kisses your neck but won’t bite down. “Know if he can efin  _do_  that anemonemore. Come on, angler, have a little fun.”  
  
There’s a long silence, a thinking pause, and then he reaches down and trails his fingers through your hair and you  _whine_ , long and low and needing.   
  
“…yeah,” he says all slow and quiet. “…okay.”  
  
There’s nothing you can do, and half of you is moaning at the thought and more fucking turned on than you have been in a perigee and the other half of you is whispering to you, whispering terror, whispering weakness. Kurloz strokes his fingers down the side of your face and you squeeze your eyes shut and whimper for him.  
  
“...but you have to take that out,” he growls, and she groans and taps her fingers all impatient on whatever she’s gagged you with. “Won’t fucking have it, Meenah, he has to be able to motherfucking talk or you’re letting him go right the hell now and walking away.”  
  
“ _Fiiiine_ ,” she grumbles, and then it’s gone and you’re gasping. The first thing out of your mouth is terrible, all breathless whining pleading, no words in it at all.  
  
“I know, little one,” he soothes at you, and he nips at your throat, too gentle to even sting, just enough you feel the points of his teeth but not the pain they could cause you. Noises happen out of you. Nothing more. Just noises. “You just settle, now. Let me just play at you for a bit, let me have you.”  
  
His hands are so big and they quiet the fear of you down a little. You nod, not sure as sure but surer than you were, and he kisses you without even a touch of his fangs, runs his nails through your hair and presses forward at you. The empress rubs her hands over your back and the nape of your neck and it feels good,  _so_  good. You’re shuddering of it already and they’ve barely started in on you.  
  
You couldn’t come yet, though. You couldn’t do it just at this moment, not if they asked you to, you can feel it. It’s not there for you. You can’t tell if it would  _ever_  be there for you with them having you like this, just quiet and slow and soft. There’s no sharpness to it.  
  
And it doesn’t  _stop_ , they don’t falter and they don’t cease, they just hold and touch and kiss and sometimes they’ll break from you and go for each other and you hear them hiss in pain and snap at each other but when they come back to you it’s soft enough to set you staggering. You can’t hardly stop crying out to draw in a breath and there’s tears running down your face and it feels so fucking  _good_  but it don’t satisfy. You think, dizzy and half out your own pan, of climbing the cliff by your hive and you, you-- _fuck_ , you fucking  _hurt_ in all the wrong ways _,_  how long has it been, feels like eternity--you can’t let go until you reach the top, but you can’t  _see_  the top to this one, you can’t see the end of this and you’re not sure how long your hands can cling to it and how long it’ll be until you let go.  
  
You don’t know what happens, if you let go before you reach the top. Thought scares you, and you try to say something about it, but the words coming out of your mouth don’t make no sense. Cliffs and climbing, fear and all shaking dizziness, all of it wound up in your noises and your sobs. It’s not like pain, pain that makes you distant and slices you open and lifts you up into the light in your entirety. You’re locked up inside yourself, tormented, and it eats you up like flames at paper--you’re going away in shreds. You’re losing track of yourself.  
  
You beg for pain, and Kurloz croons at you but the empress laughs. Urges him  _not yet, not yet_ \--! He doesn’t take that well, they fight over your head, snarling, words you can’t make out and don’t fucking care about, pressing you up between them so close you can’t breathe--can’t remember  _how_  to breathe and you can’t remember how to think and you’re going to forget, you’re going to lose track any second now and not know how to make your heart beat anymore, because they’re making you  _nothing_  and you’re lost and drowning in fog and fucking _terrified_  and you can’t, can’t can’t you  _can’t_ \--  
  
Kurloz’s hand curls possessive around your horn, and you shatter.  
  
“ _Stop_ ,” you’re gasping, and he makes a noise in the back of his throat like shock and like fear. “Fuck,  _s-stop stop Kurloz_ please _\--!_ “ He grabs you tighter and for a single moment, for a breath, you think he’s not going to listen and you sob, helpless, into his shoulder. But he just gets a hold on you and pulls, rips you right out of the cold arms wrapped around you, lays you down and pulls his hands away from you.  
  
The floor’s cold and you’re too hot and shaking all over and you just press your face down on that cool metal and cry like a wriggler.  
  
“Fucking hell,” says Kurloz, and you can’t tell if his voice is shaking or if it’s in your pan telling you lies. He touches your shoulder and still won’t hurt you and it makes you cry out terror that they’re going to keep on taking you apart, breaking you down to nothing, you’re not going to--you can’t-- “No-- _shit--_ “ and then, loud but not at you, snarling, “ _GET OUT._ “ He doesn’t take his hand from you, but he doesn’t touch you more either. “ _What do you need_?” he asks you, urgent and sharp and you just tremble and sob,  _hurt me hurt me please I’ll do fucking anything hurt me please--_  
  
He pulls out one of your hands, pins it flat on the floor and you don’t see what he does but it sends your world off and spinning. Pain hits you so hard it feels like your death come to take you away and everything goes sharp in its light, your sobbing breath sucked out of you and your trembling ceased. Feels like salvation and horrors ceased, and you scream yourself out from it and thrash. But he’s got you, he holds on, he doesn’t stop hurting you until you finally start to go still again.  
  
He lays a big hand on your back and this time you can let him. Your eyes are open but you’re not seeing. You’re making noises but not words. You’re stilled but your insides are still shaking, your pusher beating fast and hard and high in you so you can’t hardly breathe.  
  
You feel his hand on your back and work at not dying.  
  
“Sorry,” he’s saying, this great, low rumble of a thing, over and over, and some bit of you is warmed at him, that the word sounds so unpracticed and strange when he says it. Not much cause to apologize night to night. Nobody to apologize to. “Fuck, I’m--sorry--”  
  
You can’t even fucking  _contemplate_  saying words, so instead you just lean into his hand all steady on you and make a tiny little worn-up croon at the good in that, how solid he feels. He gathers you up, slow and bit by bit, waiting for you to tell him ‘no’ again, all you still shaking, hitting little waves of pain and pleasure and making the weakest little sounds out of your own control. You’re getting bigger but you still fit up against him and lifting you ain’t even no thing for him--you go still as he holds you, and you just drift off. Not sleeping. Just...drifting.  
  
He carries you--works your body around, does things you can’t be fucked to notice. Things change all around, and you listen to yourself breathing. You can. You can breathe. You’re not going to stop, you’re not going to die, you’re o-fucking-kay and your hand is a constant little jolt of pain to remind you of that, keep you where you are.  
  
You drift.  
  
You come back to after sweeps and sweeps and sweeps, and he’s got you laid out, wrapped up in something warm and your arm laid out on something flat. He’s washed you up a bit while you were gone, and you can feel he’s taken off your paint. His is gone too. There’s tight, sad, angry lines at the corners of his mouth now, and between his brows, and he pulls out bottles and threads and little curved needles, working in little jolts of pain at the hand he hurt for you.  
  
You turn just a little to see, and your hand’s got a spot in the middle of your palm, deep and dark, bleeding pretty bad. You wonder if you would be able to fit a finger through it. Maybe too small.  
  
“ _...’loz_ ,” is the first thing you get yourself to say, and he looks up and sees you and the look on his face is a one you never want to see again. He looks like he’s--  
  
\--  
  
\-- _scared_  of him, all of a sudden, of how young he still is and how far you thought you could push him and that you  _didn’t fucking notice_. You only give pain with intent to give pain, but pleasure’s this soft-edged thing, it’s hard to control and you don’t know fucking how and you’ve never heard him say  _stop stop stop_  like that, like despair. Like dying. You’d forgotten when you used to be afraid of hurting him, you’d fallen complacent to the thought that you’re the one who’s a ruler, a king, a  _god_ , but he was  _invincible_. There was nothing you could do wrong to him.  
  
You learned a hundred sweeps ago that there’s no such thing as invincible. It’s your own stupid fucking fault for forgetting it.  
  
He curls the fingers of the hand you’re working on, touches clumsy on your hand where it holds him flat to the table, and you let yourself slide your freer fingers through his an inch at a time and doubt yourself every single move.  
  
“... _hey_ ,” he says, barely more than a whisper, and squeezes at your fingers. “... _‘s a brother up to?_ “  
  
“You’ve got a fucking  _hole_  through your hand,” you say, and he looks at the work you did and nods, slow and dizzy. “Needs stitching up.” You take another stitch and his fingers twitch a little, his eyes fall half shut. You always did love sowing up flesh, more than any other thing. It gives so different from cloth, the beads of blood that catch on the thread so fine like little jewels.  
  
You just want to be done with this job, though. There’s no joy in it this time.  
  
“...called your palemate,” you say, for all it feels like it’s tearing at your throat it’s better than thinking about how shaken up and broken down he looks. Like he could sleep for a sweep, although he’s been unconscious or something like for an hour yet.  
  
“Karkat?” He looks at you wondering. “...but. You hate when he’s here.”  
  
Oh, he noticed. For some reason you managed to fool yourself to think he wouldn’t. Or, he managed to fool you that he didn’t, more like. Sly boy when he needs to be, your descendant.  
  
“Yeah, well,” you say, and pull the thread through again. Tug it tight and clip it neat. “Figure you need him more’n me, right this second.”  
  
He makes an unhappy little frown at you, but he doesn’t say ‘no’ either. Can’t deny to you he needs his moirail, not after that. You can take care, but you can’t...do. What Vantas does. You can’t do that for him. (When Vantas is gone, you still won’t be able to,  _nobody_  will be able to do for him what Vantas does, and you hate him for it.)  
  
“He’ll be here in an hour or two,” you say, and thread the needle again. Start the next suture. You’re almost done--it’s a thin cut. You have to give thanks to your years of inquisition, you know how to carve up a hand without making it useless and paralyzed, you can cut into it without cutting a cord or a vessel. His hand’ll be fine.  
  
“... _thanks,_ “ he says, real quiet, and falls still and silent. You think he’s focusing on the pain in his hand, letting it ground him--you let him, keep your trap shut as long as you can. But you’re horror-drawn to the wound you done him, not on his hand but inside him. Can’t stop circling that hurting, trying to get it in your hands and understand how making him feel good could take him worse than every other mean of torture you’ve used on him. You’ve driven trolls mad with pain with less than you’ve done to him. You’ve stopped their hearts and killed them. But he’s never begged off till now.  
  
“...How you feel, anyway?” You ask, and he jumps a bit--you think he was starting to drift off to sleep.  
  
“...like behemoth leavings,” he mumbles, and yawns real big. He turns his hand over for you without askin’; the cut is dark and ugly between the fine bones in his hands. “Like, like, uh...ugh. Fell off the cliff. Knew I would.”  
  
“What cliff?” He doesn’t answer--just mumbles and drops his face into the crook of his elbow. Confusing wriggler.  
  
You aren’t intending to open your mouth again, yet you do.  
  
“...sorry,” you tell him again, and he jumps again and stares at you this time, eyes all wide.  
  
“No,” he says, real simple and quiet. “C’mon brother, don’t--”  
  
“I should have been fucking  _watching_ ,” you snarl at yourself, and you remember how you’d been not paying him attention, growling at Meenah over him, not noticing the signs that you fucking _know_  are there when he’s taking too much and he can’t handle any more. And when you knew how he takes to pleasure and all, and when you  _knew_  Meenah’s already been playing with him before you arrived--  
  
“Wasn’t too much,” he mumbles, and his voice is ragged and tiny. “Not till right motherfucking then, it just--all sudden-like I just-- _couldn’t_ , it was. Too...” he shudders all over and you pull shut the last stitch and lift him up into your lap to hold onto him. You’re happier, when you hold onto him. The both of you, you’ve always been for touching and holding,  _holding_ , like you’re afraid to not be skin-on-skin for a moment. Sometimes feels like he’s as much an extension of you as your own motherfucking hands.  
  
...and then there’s the other times, when you’re aware so keen of how he isn’t. He’s got a leg a little twisted, hurt and healed up strange, he’s got skinny shoulders and hair softer than yours and his hands are thin like yours but pointed, all clever and delicate-lookin’. You wonder where else his slurry came from, what bits of him aren’t yours. You wonder what it is in him that wants pain so bad and screams and locks away at the touch of pleasure. You wonder what the fuck he’s still doin’, hanging around with you.  
  
He purrs in your arms and you feel like a piece of shit and you feel like the luckiest troll in the universe. Shit ain’t fair. You’re a king, and he should have better.  
  
You get distracted from sappy thoughts and pointless poetry by him squirming around like he wants to pull back from you, and you sigh and let him go. Doesn’t pull out of your arms though. Just sits back enough so he can see your face.  
  
“You need a motherfucking moirail as bad as me,” he says, and he looks up at you all worried and thank all the messiahs he doesn’t try to pap you. Kid had no hint of social graces when he came to you sweeps ago, but at least by now he knows quadrants, he knows you don’t pap your fucking matesprit. You got your kinks, but that ain’t one of them.  
  
You think for a second that it might be, if he was the one doing it, and then you hate yourself a bit more.  
  
“See,” he says, and you blink. “You gone and all wandering off again. You only do that when you’re really pissed or you got something eating at you, I been all getting my motherfucking peep on at you when you worry about shit.”  
  
“Got a lot to worry about,” you say, but it’s a surprised bluff, buying time. You don’t rightly know what to say to that. The boy has a pan and he does use it. The boy knows things he don’t say.  
  
You got to stop figuring everyone is blind and deaf and dumber than you by half. You opened up to him, and he gone and  _seen_  you.  
  
“Let’s worry about you first, little one,” you tell him, and he grumbles. “I’m older. I’ll bide.”  
  
“Let’s worry about you first, old man,” he snarks back at you, sulky and almost bitter. “You’re more fucked up about it than me and all.”  
  
You don’t know the last time he snapped at you like that. You blink at him and try to figure how you even answer that. He sits tight and unhappy. He hunches down and runs his fingers over the stitches in his hand. He doesn’t look on you. That bitter frown is changing, but you can’t quite figure at what it is now, what he’s feeling.   
  
“…Gamzee,” you say, and you don’t know what you’re going to say next, but it turns out you don’t have to. He looks up at you and his eyes all tinted with purple, his ears pinned back.   
  
“… _I fucked it up_ ,” he says, real quiet. “… _such a good motherfucking thing we had and all and I couldn’t just—_ ”  
  
You don’t have the first fucking clue what he’s talking about, but your hand itches to smack him on the back of the nug regardless. You can smell the bullshit he’s thinking, even if you don’t know what it is yet.   
  
“Gamzee,” you tell him again, as calm and smooth as all what’s can be. “You just tell me, real calm, what the actual fucking hell you’re talking about, and why you’re talkin’ like this ain’t a thing anymore.”  
  
“I.” He presses his thumb hard at his stitches—his hands shake. You slap his wrist.  
  
“Gonna pop your stitches,” you growl at him. “Quit.” He hunches and quits. “What do you figure you fucked up?”  
  
He doesn’t open his mouth, can’t look on you. You sigh and reach out and stroke his hair.  
  
“Difficult wriggler,” you tell him, with no small deal of affection. “If you don’t want this over then I’m sure as hell not ending it, you get me on this? You fucking mark it.”  
  
He chews at his lip and nods. “—won’t do that again,” he says, real fast and quiet, and he leans into your hand, eyes squeezed tight. “…promise, I—just—that one time, I’ll be fine next time, I won’t stop you again—”  
  
Oh.  
  
Oh hellbound and damned most unfunny of mother— _fucking_ —  
  
“The actual  _fuck_?!” You ask him, and he jumps at the sudden loudness of you, not flinching like he’s afraid you’ll hit him but jumping back and wincing at the noise. You are not set to apologize for it. You want this rattling in his skull like the very echo of the Vast Honk, you want him hearing this for the next hundred sweeps, you are so fucking  _done_  with him thinking you’ll get tired of him or you’ll drop him by the wayside if you can’t hurt him anymore or you don’t fucking  _pity_  him as flush and close as sea for sand. “If I ever catch you unhappy with what I do to you and  _not telling me,_ ” you tell him, and take him by both horns and  _force_  him to look up at you, right at your face. “I’ll put you as far away from me as the most distant fucking stars, wriggler, as far away as I got to to keep you safe from me, you understand?! _ARE WE FUCKING CLEAR ON THAT?!_ I don’t  _ever._ Want to fuck you up again like I did today. I don’t  _ever_  want to be hurting you like that, and if I’m a danger to you—” you squeeze his horns and he gasps at it, drawn with attention to you, breathless. “ _I’ll get you out of that danger_ ,” you finish, and he stares at you so scared and shocked as you never seen him. “I’ll get you away from me.”  
  
“But,” he says, and you glare at him, pissed as all hell, and he opens and shuts his mouth again like a fish out of water and stares back. “No, I don’t want—”  
  
“Then keep doing what you did today,” you tell him, firm and cold and strong as the iron cuffs. “You keep  _tellin’_ me when you can’t take no more. You did good, that was fucking  _good_.”  
  
His eyes go wider. You want to fuck him and you want to hold him forever and you want to beat the shit out of him for being an idiot and you want to kiss his stupid face, the little  _shit._  “Why do you  _figure_  we talked it all out, first time we set down in this stupid quadrant?” you point out at him, and he does a touch of a double-take at the memory.   
  
You’d told him, hadn’t you, you’d told him he could stop you. He’s screamed for you sometimes, things he doesn’t think before he says,  _no_ and  _please_  and he’s told you  _I can’t, I can’t_ , and maybe you’d slow for those and see how he took it when you backed off. But the only thing he’s ever had to say, the only thing he’s never asked you to do, even when he was so far out of his pan he couldn’t hardly remember his own name if you asked him—the one thing he had to tell you was _stop._  
  
“But,” he says. “You didn’t—I mean, you didn’t get to—”  
  
Sometimes he makes you want to put your head through a wall. More strongly right at this instant, he makes you want to put  _his_ head through a wall. This child, this  _wriggler_  still not comprehending, still too young and unformed to grasp at what  _flushed_  means and that the fact of you bringing him to the breaking point and making him beg you for mercy is more important than you filling pails—fuck you’re going to strangle him some night.  
  
“You have no fucking concept, the things I would give up for my brothers and sisters,” you snarl at him, anger and frustration and fucking _pity_ at him, that he can’t get this through his pan. “The things I  _have_  given up for my brothers and sisters, and them not quadranted to me, that’s  _church_ , little brother, that’s  _holy goddamned MOTHERFUCKING_ BROTHERHOOD. And you in my flushed quadrant, you who’ve seen my face bared and shown me yours in return, you think I  _fucking CARE_  if I get off, when I got you  _begging_  me to stop?! What makes this thought stick in you so sharp, Gamzee, what did I give you for a  _fraction of a second_  that’s got you so sure I’m going to LEAVE YOU?!”  
  
“I—” It’s hurting him, you can see it, you’re hurting him and you try to drag yourself back in control but it fucking  _hurts_ , that spot of rotting mistrust, that spot of doubt, withholding from you. “I have to—I—i-if I’m not—!” He chokes himself off and stares at you, and he looks so helpless to put it into form of words it shoots right through you. Takes some edge off where you couldn’t quite do so yourself.   
  
“… _why do you think I’m going to leave?_ ” You ask him again, and it’s the softness that breaks him, it always has been.  
  
“… _dad left_ ,” he says, and it’s choked and desperate and small. “Dad left and I don’t—fuckin’ know what I did, I—” His face is crumpled and pained and painful to look on, he’s still so worn out and every word just wears away more. You are silent as stones. “…he’d be back but then he’d just turn around and go again and, I, I, I didn’t know what to do to make him stay, I kept sitting and waiting for him, but—”  
  
You see him as he came to you, all small and desperate, so  _desperate_  to please, on how he hangs to his moirail so tight and can’t quite figure how touching works sometimes, on how thin he was and how lonely. You wrap him up tight and close and squeeze until his breath comes short and hard into your shoulder, until he’s squeezing you back so hard it almost hurts.  
  
“ _Don’t go,_ ” he begs, and you tell him back  _I won’t_ , over and over until he’s sleeping silent and spent and wrung out dry, and he can’t be scared anymore.


	9. You're Better Here

“He did  _what_?”  
  
Karkat sits up so hard you fall off him. You whine at him, but he’s pissed for some reason and he doesn’t answer back at you or notice. He springs up out of the pile and starts all pacin’ up and down, like he’s got too much mad inside him and he needs to walk around to let it the fuck out. You were jammin’ till right up then—you’re left all chilly and dizzy and abandoned on the pile and you whine at him again but he don’t notice.

“Was the empress as put the thought in his pan,” you point out, but that doesn’t seem to make him less harsh on your matesprit. He’s got his eyebrows down low and his teeth bared and it’s only when he looks down at you and sees you still laid out on the pile and loose from his touch that he softens enough to come back to you.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, “—and I’m pissed at her too, okay. I heard she did  _something_  when she got back from the fleet a night early, she was like  _your moray-eel is weird as glub,_ but when I asked, she wouldn’t give me a straight fucking answer. But he went along with it, Gamzee, he knew that cagey, teasing bullshit fucks you up! He should have noticed you were scared.”  
  
You curl up a little bit at that, because you know that he holds Kurloz to the highest standard and you know worse yet that so does Kurloz for himself. “… _he’s begged his forgivenesses for that_ ,” you say, real quiet. “… _I gave, brother, he ain’t fucked up all the time I known him. When I asked for it, he stopped that very motherfucking second._ ”  
  
He softens another touch. Enough to come down next to you and run his nails up and down your back. Feels real good, the kinda good that doesn’t seek at pailing, but just for making feel good, and you let it. Got harder to take even that for a while, after a few days ago. But Karkat’s got you.  
  
He’s got you.  
  
“He does…seem to treat you better than I expected,” he allows finally, all sorts of motherfuckin’ grim like he’s bein’ forced to do wicked testimony, dragged inch by inch out his maw. “…and—fuck. If you tell him I said this I’ll pull your teeth out—no, you’d get off on that, wouldn’t you.”  
  
“Fuck yeah.”  
  
He rolls his eyes at you. “You make my job hard sometimes, you leaky-panned shithive grubfucker,” he says, all sweet at you. “How the fuck am I supposed to threaten you? Ugh. Just. He’s…not a bad ruler. That’s all I’m saying. He does his job fast and doesn’t make a lot of bullshit extra noise about it and he makes my job easier a lot of days.”  
  
You grin at him so big as it hurts your motherfuckin’ face and he scowls back and honks your nose. “He’s still an asshole, though!” He says, and you laugh at him. Feels good comin’ out. It’s been a while since you laughed, and servant of mirth and all you should have no wanting of things to laugh at. He slaps at you, too soft to hurt, butts one of his nubby little horns up against the base of yours and pretends like he’s growling at you. You press your face into him and hold on for a while while he squalls at you  _get off me you giant faygo-swilling chuckle-fuck beach slug—!_ And flails around tryin’ to get his arms out from under yours to hit you better.  
  
You kiss his precious face, real soft and pale and finally he grumbles himself quiet. He sulks at you and you kiss his frowny-ass mouth pale as diamonds and rub your cold nose at his until his frown turns into rolled eyes again and a reluctant laugh.  
  
“Don’t rile yourself up now, best friend,” you tell him, and he puts his face in your neck and sighs. It’s tickly. You snort. “—I got this. We got this.”  
  
“ _You’re still flushed for him_?” He asks and it sounds soft, like he ain’t sure which answer he’s more scared at.  
  
“…flushed like your precious blood,” you tell him, and he sighs again, longer and deeper and slower. “Flushed like dying-star fire, I swear. He thought he’d broke me for good, Karkat, I ain’t ever seen his face like that before. I got that pity all inked down to the depths of my soul.”  
  
“…I know,” he says, real quiet. “I know you do.”  
  
He lies there still and quiet for a time or two, and you wrap yourself up around him and purr just from the warm of him, push your nose in his soft hair. You’d touch his horns if you could—don’t wanna move your arms from him though, and usin’ your mouth on them is a touch too flushed-feelin’ for your tastes, from how you remember it feelin’ when Kurloz has put lips and tongue and teeth to yours. So you just breathe in his hair and love him.  
  
“…think you’ll ever be okay with that again?” he asks finally, and it’s been so long since you were talkin’ you jump and have to shake awake. Didn’t realize you were almost drifted off. Your pan’s kinda fuzzy and tired.  
  
“Okay with what?” you ask, like a dumbass.  
  
“With…” he chews his lip for a second before he finishes. “…with him… _not_  hurting you.”  
  
Oh.  
  
You have to think on that. Makes you scared to even contemplate, remembering how it felt at you last time—like your self was headed far away in all directions, torn to pieces and taken apart. His sweet cruelty when he’s teasing at you is always a shivering tension, never usually so bad as that—you liked it, before it went so far. Before it came at you so pure and unceasing. You know Kurloz liked it too, you saw it in his face when he watched you, how he loved taking you apart before he took out his love for hurt on you. In love for your pain and love for making you beg for it, his pleasure’s always come two-motherfucking-fold.  
  
“…yeah,” you say, after messiahs know how long, when all those thoughts gotten their wicked business hashed out up in your thinkpan. “Yeah, figure so.”  
  
“Seriously?” He sounds mad. You sigh. “But—”  
  
“Okay,” you say over him, real quick before he can get pissed and try to stand up again. “Okay, like. If. If you…you like…like, you like meat, right.”  
  
“Gamzee, why the fuck does that—”  
  
“You like meat, right best friend?”  
  
“Yeah,” he allows, all suspicious-slow like he thinks you’re settin’ a trap for him. He is edges all the way to the core of him, and you pity his precious soul for all that, but you ain’t got time for that just now. You got enough troubles tryin’ to wrap your pan around what’s happenin’ in the insides of it. Thinkin’s hard. Especially when you just want to curl up purring and drift away. “…I’m okay with meat. So…?”  
  
“So like…you like some grubloaf with it too.”  
  
“Okay, sure?”  
  
“So, you’re havin’ a meal and someone all says at you, ‘you’re gonna eat just grubloaf until you figure you had a good eating’, right.”  
  
“Are you—?”  
  
You put a finger over his mouth. The thought ain’t at home in your pan and it keeps all almost slippin’ out, but you think you got it, sneaky little motherfucker as it is.  
  
“…so you like some grubloaf and it’s good but you gotta just keep eatin’ and eatin’ and you don’t ever feel you got proper food because you can’t get no meat, but, like, you can’t fuckin eat no more and nobody notices you’re sick as hell of grubloaf and that’s what happened,” you finish, all in a rush. Think back over what you said. Sounds about right. “…and it ain’t like you never want to eat grubloaf again, you just can’t look it in the motherfuckin’ face for a night or two…’cause, like,” you explain at Karkat, “…the meat is, like—”  
  
“No, no,” he talks over you, half-laughing, “—no, shit, I got the metaphor, Gamzee, you don’t have to explain it to me, I just—fuck, I didn’t even know you  _could_  do metaphors. Well, not metaphors that aren’t about bullshit clowns or tents or blood or some shit.”  
  
“Man,” you say, glad and fuzzy and peaced the fuck out, “…I fuckin’ love clowns and tents and blood and shit.”  
  
“Yeah Gamzee,” he sighs, and he pats your face again. You purr at him. “I know you do. Thanks for…the metaphor. I guess. Even though now I have to imagine him force-feeding you grubloaf and frankly I could do without that particular nausea-inducing mental image.”  
  
“Nah,” you say, but you gotta grin a little in thinking on it, thought of your mouth full and his hand in your hair. “—ain’t what he’d choose to feed me anyway, he got better things to—”  
  
“ _Holy oozing slime-festering_ hell,” he groans, and covers up your mouth. “No, no no no  _no_  I _really_  don’t need to think about that, holy  _shit_  you are so fucking  _gross_ —there’s such a thing as _over-fucking-sharing_ , Gamzee, even to your palemate! In some cases  _especially_  to your palemate!”  
  
You kiss the palm of his hand over your mouth and he pulls his palm away and pinches your lips shut instead. You just grin at him around the pinched part and he glares for only a couple seconds before he snorts and gives up on bein’ pissed at you. He’s almost as pale-dreamy as you are right this instant. He flops back down and takes his hand away.  
  
“You are such a dopey shit-faced asshole,” he points out.  
  
“Yeah bro.”  
  
“I don’t know why I put up with you.”  
  
“Pitiable as fuck, bro.”  
  
“Yeah you are,” he sighs. “Fakey bullshit clown gods help me, you are.”  
  
You hug him real hard all over because  _fuck_  yeah, you love it when he talks about your gods even all grumpy-like like he does, and he huffs and swats at you until you ease up. Right. You’re so used to huggin’ Kurloz you forget sometimes. You’re gonna break somethin’ of his someday, and then you’ll feel like shit.  
  
“Come on,” he says. “…my flight back isn’t for like another half a night. Where do you even keep your ‘coon in this gross clown den.”  
  
“Show you,” you offer, and then before he can get up you scoop your arms down under him, lift him up and carry him off like motherfuckin’ storybooks.  
  
He flails so much he rolls out of your arms just as you get to your ‘coon, splashes down with all his clothes still on and swearing a lot, but you climb in after him and he gets tired of yellin’ at you after the first minute or two. Especially when you start at pullin’ his uniform off for him and rub slime good and slow in his tense-up back and his precious little shoulders so painful and tight.  
  
He’s watchin’ you.  
  
“…you’re honestly fucking better here,” he says, hopeless. “…aren’t you?”  
  
You just smile and smooth sopor through his hair, rub it into the beds of his horns and make him let out this precious little broken-up noise. He’s going away, all foggy and sweet and tired.  
  
“… _be here,”_ he says, every word a work. “… _when I…wake up.”_  
  
“Sure thing.” You got things to do tomorrow—ain’t a holiday for you and there’s paperwork still needs doing from your last mission together and new assignments to look for. But you can lay in with him. You can stick around. “ _I’ll be here._ ” And, “ _…pale for you,_ ” you add on too, and he smiles when he falls asleep and you drop off to the rare sweet sound of his purring, driving off the monsters in your dreams like far-off thunder.  
  
\--  
  
Meenah does not try to come back onto your ship again, and for that you are grateful,  _you send up motherfucking prayers of thanks_ , because you don’t think you could hold off getting pissed if she showed up to see you again yet. And if she started in on Gamzee you would definitely not be able to remain all chill and sweet with her fuckery. It is a cowardice, passing some blame off on her, but it helps, does surely assist, in such little measure as makes the guilt bearable.  
  
Gamzee just wants it all to be normal again, you know. You can tell it, from the way he talks to you and how he tries to push you to push him again. You don’t  _want_  to push him. (You do want to push him, but you don’t want him shaking and begging you to stop, you don’t want to go too far again.) You definitely don’t touch him gentle again, and you can read off of him that he notices, that he ain’t rightly sure whether that makes him happy or not. You know it scared him, always, but it was a sweet torture to him, you know just as much that he liked how you used it to make him beg for you. But it did scare him, and at some part his feeling on the lack is good. But he knows you stay your hand there because you fear and worry, and that makes him frown.  
  
He don’t talk to you about it though, and that is a thing of your bloodline, that he seeks to keep things smooth. He don’t want to knock the pail. If you got a good thing, you and him both know, you don’t push your luck, because the universe ain’t just handin’ out good things to all as come begging.  
  
You probably gotta Have a Talk. But every time you’re together you’re kissin’ and touchin’ and lookin’ for something, trying to find something. You don’t know what it is, but you need it from him, and he searches you too—for the same thing or something different, you don’t know. You want— _something_. You’ll be damned if you know what it is.  
  
You pin him up by the throat and batter his thorax with fists and claws until his ribs are almost broken, and he gasps and groans and pulls at you to kiss you like it’s the best thing he’s felt. You rake your claws down him so deep he’s bleeding hard and shaking and chirping ragged in your ear. This he’ll take. A little deeper and you’d gut him, but  _this_ he’ll take and you don’t _understand._  
  
You rake his back to match his front and grind up against him and that’s what’s got him trembling up against you and keening;  _“Please,_ ” he’s gasping as he comes,  _“please, please, please,_ ” and you don’t know what he needs from you but you let go of his throat and take his weight as he goes limp. You want to hold him so tight he screams. You want to do him pain enough to make up for the hurt you did him all down deep in pan and pusher.  
  
You turn yourself around so you’re the one up against the wall, hold him close and sink down so he’s pulled in tight and shivering against you. Your fingers are bloody and you draw wandering lines on his back that make him gasp and tremble.  
  
It’s a peaceful time.  
  
Time to fuck it up.  
  
“…it you take this as like I’m breakin’ your heart I’m gonna stomp your head flat,” you say, finally and quiet in his hair. “…but what the fuck are we doing?”  
  
He stiffens up for a second, and then mumbles something you can’t hear against your chest. You take a handful of his hair and pull nice and slow until he has to tilt his head back and stop hiding.  
  
“You been worryin’,” you say, and he huffs out a big, long, tired sigh. When you let go of his hair, he flops his head back down on your shoulder.  
  
“You too,” he points out, and you nod the point to him. Can’t deny it. “Told you I fucked us up.”  
  
“ _We_  fucked us up,” you correct him. “You ain’t the only party in this clusterfuck, little one.”  
  
He doesn’t argue, though you would bet half your fleet he wants to. You play at the spots you clawed on his back and feel him chewing at his lip against your shoulder, pretendin’ like it doesn’t get to him. Wriggler wants to be so serious on this. Wriggler wants to be real and genuine and true with you. Fucking hell but you love him.  
  
“…don’t want to fuck you up like that again,” you say, finally and he nods like this is what he knew already. His dear little shape all pressed up at you and you feel that slick wetness of blood on your fingers and love it. You want to go back to hurting him again, but some part of you, some ancient part that’s grown over sweeps and sweeps tells you you’re bein’ a coward. That that would be running from him, to give up and hurt him instead. The sweet little helpless noises he makes may be pretty and sweet to you and take your breath out of you wanting him, but they aren’t words to take apart what’s come between the two of you. They don’t solve no problems.  
  
“I don’t want you to fuck me up like that again either, motherfucker,” he points out. “But—shit, brother, you done fine before, and it was all, like, bein’…what, almost a sweep?”  
  
“… _almost a sweep_ ,” you say, quiet, and you realize that that it truly was. No more than a sweep, when you’ve had so many hundreds of sweeps, but this single blink of your life has been so much of you and has taken so long. They’d been flickering by you, one after another, but he came and he took and he stretched your life out and made it somethin’ fine and sweet and hot like you haven’t felt since you were young.  
  
You want to take him to the torture rooms again, for the night you first laid hands on his skin with intent to hurt. You want to give him a quadranting-night to remember for another hundred sweeps.  
  
You want another hundred sweeps.  
  
He’s been talkin’ to you and you have been wandering far and wide and not attending. You blink and try to figure if you can bullshit enough you don’t have to let on you were too busy thinkin’ about his sweet screams to hear his voice in the now and here.  
  
“—until the motherfucking fish-b—uh—until the empress showed up,” he’s saying. “And she as what got you on the thought in the first motherfucking place, if she’s not there…you  _get_  me, brother, you know when I had enough.”  
  
He’s looking at you with that look like you’ve got every answer as is or has ever been. You got to look away from that look. He believes in you as more than you are, you think sometimes, and you are a great deal but to him you are moon and stars and suns all together and shit is downright shaking to your soul.  
  
“…it’s a little piece of truth,” you admit. “Meenah and me, we…go a ways back. Lost my head a little.”  
  
He mumbles something as might well be sarcastic, the little shitwad. You do the trick where you pinch his grubscars and he forgets how to be all knowin’ at shit and cool and back-sass at you because he’s too busy squeakin’ like a squashed grub and writhing around on you. You maybe hold on a little longer than you need, till the shock wears off, till his writhing around at surprise turns into something slower and his squeaks turn low and out of breath. Then you let go. He groans at you, already smelling of his interest, already bright-eyed and shuddering for you. The stamina of the wriggler. You are ever surprised.  
  
“Greedy,” you accuse him all mellow, and he props his chin up on your chest and grins at you.  
  
“Yeah but,” he says. “You like me that way.”  
  
You swat his ass for bein’ right, and he leans up and gets his mouth at your throat and that’s that done, that’s that talked out for now. You give up on thinkin’ about it, and this time around you spend the time to hold him down and dare at playing your hands over his sides real gentle and even as he whines and struggles at you, you know he notices and you know he knows.  
  
After that, you let him go. He needs to sleep in his own ‘coon sometimes, or people are gonna start wondering where it is he does sleep, and you ain’t ashamed of him in the slightest but you haven’t talked on that yet. That secret is still yours and his and you alone can’t let it go freely without asking him first. That is a secret that would spread, for fucking sure.   
  
A few nights later he goes on another mission, and once again does he return whole. This time, not even a scratch, and he returns with his brother on his shoulder as he saved with his own two hands. Then another, and another, and every time a little of your worry chips away. A body can only take so much sitting and fretting. You can worry for him, but you’ll lose that the longer and longer. You’ll forget how terribly he was torn into, as the scar grows over the wound in him. You’ll grow complacent again, and you can only hope as what reminds you next time isn’t…  
  
…isn’t…  
  
…you don’t think on that. You can’t bear to. It’s a pointless thought, with him out and doing his holy duty, you can’t just hide him away from it all. You could keep him locked away forever, just for you, but he wouldn’t be his own no motherfucking more. You don’t want a slave, you ain’t on the look for a pet. (And you want to prove Vantas wrong, some bit of you still hearin’ his little growly shitty-ass voice whispering at you  _you sick, ancient controlling_ trash. You want him to eat those words. You—)  
  
(…you figure it’s time you stop thinkin’ about him.)  
  
You get to him a couple times, more rarely now—you had the season of mirth, all those holidays and celebrations one after another, and now comes another four or five perigees where you and yours have to deal with things less heavenly. Work and blood and destruction. Your children descend on planets like hungry insects and eat them away till they’re bare and raw for the empire to mold. You crush more sufferists, more and more, but when you make their deaths public, make it clear what waits for that cult, it dies in cowardice,  _it writhes in its wretched lowblood muck_  and it does not grow after that.  
  
You also get a day with Gamzee, and he holds the big, glass jars and goes with you from prisoner to dying prisoner as you take blood of all shades. Takes a while bleeding out a troll. Takes a while and you got plenty of time and darkness and a locked door and heretics learn your secret and see him undone and then take the secret with them to death. You put knife and needles to his flesh and sow scars up and up his legs until you can play the steel over the edges of his nook and make him sob with wanting.  
  
you don’t do it, though. You don’t press down, you stay your hand and you find other ways. You regret his mortality, his frailty, because you are most powerfully fucked in the pan and you never quite satisfy yourself, never quite. And he regrets it more, he knows why you leave him whole but you know he dreams carnage and wreckage, the things you could do to him that would be beyond his healing. He dreams of you ruining him.  
  
You wish you could. But if you ruined him he would be—well, fuck, he would be  _ruined._  He would be finished, nothing else left, crippled or worse and you want no such life for him,  _you are fierce and frozen with love of him_  and your protection is sunk into your bones. You could no more kill him than burn your fleet out of the sky.  
  
In among all those lofty thoughts though, all those bright and fearful times where you have him fragile and biddable in your hands, life keeps its march on. Enough of your brothers and sisters come to you with recommendation, you see fit to promote him—levels ain’t so much a thing that’s set, in your ship, but it will be known that you said all those new-hatched little wrigglers ain’t the only ones who should get their heed on when Gamzee Makara gives an order. He has been advanced in your regard, to them. They got no way of knowin’ just how much the  _regard_ they got their feeble know of lags behind your heart.  
  
The rest of them just get themselves on with what all needs doing. Your trolls find missions for themselves, get themselves together and watch shitty movies together, drink and fight and bring grievances to you, make quadrants and then fight over quadrants. Some of them come to you and ask your guidance in interrogation, which you gladly give, since you got a full hold of prisoners again after a couple of your older and wiser cracked a meeting of red-painted freaks wide open and snatched them before they could run. Gamzee shows up to sit at the back of the room and watch as you teach ways to hurt, but he leaves half the way through after a couple hours shifting around and chewing his lips and keeping his hands hard down at his sides. That’s fine though—private lessons suit him better anyway. (you do vicious things to him, a marching ladder of sowed-up scars where you flayed skin from his sides so gentle and with such care and held him still so he could hurt himself when he cried out and clawed your working table at the ecstasy.)  
  
And then he comes to your throne room to catch you up on the wicked news of his most recent of kills and you start to say somethin’ about the day and you notice him frown all somber and unhappy at you. You quit. “—what’s up?”  
  
“Can’t,” he says, and he sounds well and truly sorry. “I’m real sorry, I said I’d go out with a couple motherfuckers as helped me study shit for my tests.” He chews at his lip. “…I can…tell them I can’t—”  
  
You have a second to make a decision, but in the end you gotta be the  _responsible_  one, right. You gotta know when to not let how good he smells and the feel of his skin and hair get to you all the time. That’s your job. It gets harder every night the wriggler grows towards second pupation, it grows harder and  _fucking harder_  every night you have to smell him slopping out pheromones everywhere every time he sees you, but you are the motherfucking Grand Highblood and the church cannot be built whole and entirely on decadence.  
  
“You go on and go with,” you order him. “Can’t spend all your time locked up with this old corpse, little brother. You got kids your own age, you got a family to talk at.” You mess up his hair—he slides up against you and puts his face in your shoulder. “When you make somethin’ of yourself,” you murmur to him, a quiet reminder, “…those are the ones as you’ll count on. That your family and that your church and those your brothers and sisters, little one. We got what few trolls have. Hold onto it with tooth and motherfuckin’ claw.”  
  
“… _that’s some pretty-ass words there,_ ” he says, real hushed, like he doesn’t want to scare them away, and you laugh at him and kiss him on the same breath.  
  
“Go get at it,” you tell him, and let him go. He don’t want to go—ducks up again kisses you, pressing like he wants to be held some more. You indulge a little, but you don’t quite bite him and he has to give up on getting you to get him naked sooner or later.  
  
“…get gone,” you tell him again, and he sighs and nods. “We’ll find a time later, little brother.”  
  
“I know it,” he says, all doleful and sad-like. “Gonna walk funny whole time I try to hang out with them though.”  
  
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” you say, and pat his cheek, not soft enough to be a pap, just enough to sting a touch. “Think on it and maybe if you finish up before high day you can haul your pretty ass on over. We’ll see as how it goes. Either way, we’ll both live. Hell, do some lookin’ around! Find a hatefuck who ain’t even older than me and scary as hell!”  
  
He turns purple around the ears at that reminder, that you know how he gets with Meenah around. That’s what finally sends him scurrying. He turns back at the door like he always does, looks back at you like he’s just makin’ sure that you’re real. Then he smiles, and he leaves and closes the door behind him.


	10. A Hunger For Secrets

You’ve spent a lot of time with your brothers and sisters, but most of it’s been at service, in missions, you’ve known each other by name and joked in hallways, but you don’t exactly seek at time with them the rest of the time. You know you’re fuckin’ annoying. You don’t want them tired of you like all your friends was down on the planet so long ago.  
  
You’ve talked to them too a little--they don’t got much time for you, for loser Gamzee Makara who can’t keep his trap shut, not now as they train and as they do empire’s work as you do. There’s a dozen of you and you’d thought, somehow, you’d talk all the time--but space is  _fucking big_  and you are all hard at work.  
  
You don’t mention at having a matesprit and they don’t ask. You still rap at Tavros and there’s still the littlest twinge of sweetness as you used to feel for him. But now you got someone who’ll give you the pity you wanted, and you wonder whether it ain’t just that he liked you, that he talked to you free and easy. That you liked that he liked you.  
  
You still like that he likes you, and you like that he raps with you. You like as how he’s sweet to you. You think and you figure that he’d take it like Karkat, seeing your scars and hearing how you take to pain. You don’t make a mention of it.  
  
And he ain’t here now, and your old man is right, you ought to make closer with your brothers and sisters.  
  
So you are.  
  
Actually what you’re doin’ is sitting around with a handful of the others from your class and some older quadrants, hanging out and drinking shit that makes your eyes water. You are coming to the quick realization that every other motherfucker here gets a lot drunk a lot faster than you, bein’ as that your pan is so used to bein’ fucked with over the sweeps, but even so you are starting to get dizzy. Things are really bright and funny and you’re alternatin’ babbling shit and being silent like a rock and staring at the ground. Then somebody will yell at you and you’ll wake up and you’re talking again, so fast you can’t keep track of what you’re saying.  
  
Ain’t sure you like being drunk. Shit is downright motherfucking unusual.  
  
They already poked at you, took a good look at the hoops and the studs in your ears and the rods that go through your horns, and those they were most mightily impressed with-- _wow_  and  _how bad did that hurt, fuck_  and one of them telling you about this thing he does with needles and ink and he, like, sows pictures under your skin--sounds badass. You want one.  
  
But now they’re talking on quadrants. You go back to making like a rock and think about Kurloz and then stop thinkin’ about Kurloz in a real hurry because you’re all tingly and the thought goes straight to your bulge and your nook and the toy that is  _still there_ , thanks, and you shift around and chew on your lips and try not to make noise. You’re the only one there who didn’t bring a quadrant, seeing as Karkat is off a week’s flight away and working and Kurloz you can’t whisper a word about and if you talked about the empress and how she pushes you and torments you all intentionally, they’d laugh at you and disbelieve. Better you just keep your trap shut.  
  
And then someone goes “--and then there’s this little motherfucker!” and jostles you hard. You make a complaining growl in your shock, for all it comes out a sort of groan more than it’s in any way frightening. They just laugh. The one who was talking is one you don’t know--a quadrant who came down from the ships full of older disciples to meet up with Yettah who helped you learn filling out forms (since Kurloz sure as fuck wasn’t going to help out with them). They’re hanging on each other and knocking horns and rubbing noses and you miss Karkat something fierce.  
  
“What?” You say, because someone was talking to you.  
  
“I said, where’s your quadrants at, little brother?” says the big laughsassin, and pokes at you with a foot. “Everybody else got one here.”  
  
“...got a moirail,” you say, and shut up again. He would hate this, yell at everybody here, but then you’d get to grab him and cover his shouty mouth with a hand until he gave up being mad, you could pet his hair and wrap him up good and sweet and tight--  
  
“Hey!” Claws click in front of your face--you jump. “You’re spewin’ diamonds all which ways, motherfucker, focus up now. Shit is downright tragic.”  
  
“Fuck you,” you say, and mean it more than usual in the fuzzy place inside your drink. Everything is good and soft and bright, but the sting hurts more here, too. All these motherfuckin’ feels yankin’ you every which direction. “I miss him, okay? ‘S a...fuck, been like a perigee since I saw him last.” You hunch down and sulk.  
  
“Aw, come on,” says Yettah, and she digs her pointy elbows up in your sides. You jump and make a noise unbefitting an almost-adult. They all laugh at you. You try to glare, but in the end you gotta join in--shit is downright embarrassing. “You gotta have more than just him though. Not just a palemate. We all  _know_  about the palemate.” Nods all around, looks from one to the next like ‘ _oh, fuck yeah we know about the palemate_ ‘. “I’d call blasphemy for honest if you weren’t so hung up on him like pure messiah-given serendipity.”  
  
You got no answer to that, but your face goes hot under your paint and you take another drink of your thing to keep from looking at them.  
  
“Look at him blush!” One of your brothers sniggers--one who came for you and yours on the raid, you’ve heard, his eye patched over with gold and purple. He’s little but he’s quick and you like him considerable, even though right now you could punch him in the nub and not feel bad over it. You hunch up and pretend like your ears ain’t burning and you ain’t purple down to the thorax.  
  
“Oh fuck,” says Yettah, and she laughs some more. “--it  _is_  serendipity, isn’t it? Holy shit you’ve got it real motherfucking bad.”  
  
Words don’t come. Nod instead, and pretend you ain’t wishin’ Karkat was here to calm the fluster out of you, fuck. Drink isn’t taking you the same as sopor, all fuzzy and distant--you could’ve answered any question they asked you, on sopor. Like this everything is too bright and loud and you’re thinkin’ dumb shit and tying yourself up in knots.  
  
“Well,” she sighs. “...congratulations, I guess.  _Whoop whoop_!” And the group all choruses back at her. Someone smacks you on the back so hard in congratulations, you choke on your drink. “Give your little spitfire a pap on the ass from us,” she says, and she winks at you while you try to figure as how drink got down into your aeration sponges. “And tell him to score you some other quadrants already, fuck! You gotta have donated with _somebody_ , right? Can’t get by on nothing but pale.”  
  
Uh. Shit. Shit shit shit.  
  
“Yeah, sure,” you say fast and choked off with coughing, and they stop and they give you a look like you said way more than that, like you given something away.  
  
“...little brother,” says one you don’t know, real slowly--Geratt, you think, he’s two cohorts ahead of you and he’s full adult already--they’re all grinnin’ at you with all their teeth. “...you _holdin’ out_  on us?”  
  
Shit shit shit  _fuck_ \--  
  
“Fuck no!” you say, but it’s too quick and you might as well have said ‘yes’ as answered so hasty. You’re so fucked. You are utterly fucked right now.  
  
“Brothers and sisters, I think this is a situation that requires some inquisition!” One of the laughsassin chicks crows, and you so dizzy from drink, that goes straight to your bulge like the dumb motherfucker it is. ( _Quite a little sinner, aren’t you?_ ) You go “Uh--” and then one of the big brothers picks you up by the back of your shirt and drops you on one of the couches. Lets you keep your drink though, so that’s cool. You take another drink of it real quick, because the drunker you are, right, the more likely you black right the fuck out, and wouldn’t  _that_  be a mercy. They crowd up around you so you can’t go anywhere, but that’s cool because you ain’t in full control of your legs anyway, so that shit wouldn’t end well.  
  
“Buckets or clubs,” says one of them, and you choke on your drink again.  
  
“The  _fuck_?!”  
  
“You snag a hate-set or a motherfuckin’  _pailing_  quadrant?” the laughsassin bends down and gives you the glare all fearsome-like, but she don’t do it so well because she can’t stop grinnin’ at you. “...’fess up, little brother.” She puts on a voice, pretends at a great rumble of a yell, and you realize she’s playin’ at bein’ Kurloz, the way he’ll go soft and then something bubbling up in him brings his voice to size. “ _Confess to the motherfucking church!”_  
  
You are too out of your pan to even think on coming up with a good lie, for all there’s some part of you as knows better than to tell them who you’ve got for hearts, who it is who’s pushed at you for something like pitch. That would be the dumbest shit you ever could do. But you can’t figure out what to say, so you just stare and make dumb little noises that ain’t words by any stretch.  
  
This is not a good thing that is happening. You don’t know how far they’ll go with playing inquisition--not enough to hurt you for real, not your brothers and sisters, that they wouldn’t do--but just the pretense of it is playing a terrible amount at turning you needy and boneless and motherfucking eager. Gonna embarrass yourself real quick if anybody even tries their hand at slapping you around a bit, and you take another drink and swallow it hard and try not to think about the tight, hot stretch inside you or the throb going up you in little shivers. This is now, the one time in your life, when you gotta think,  _really hard._  Right now. Come on.  
  
...you give thinking it over a shot, and you figure eventually...if you got a choice to answer later after they figure out how to make you talk, or answer now before you can get your ass handed to you on a gilded nutrition plateau, you only really got one motherfucking option.  
  
“...flushed, okay?” You get out finally, real quiet. “Flushed is who I got, but I can’t tell you--” They ain’t listening. At the word ‘flushed’ they stopped hearing you and got busy whooping and messing your hair and thank messiahs the one standing in front of you steps back far enough so you can pull your knees together and up to your chest.  
  
You take another drink.  
  
“So why can’t he tell us, is the question,” says Uderak, and he tilts his head at you, looks at you one eye, then the other--always says his snakedad taught him that, helps him see better now his one eye is gone. You owe him a debt, and you don’t want to lie to him and you don’t want to stay quiet about this shit anymore, so you take another drink and panic real quiet and soft into it as you swallow. Your head is goin’ kinda fuzzy now, wow, this shit is good.  
  
“Tell us about her,” somebody says at you, half a lazy purr, and you frown real hard and try to make your thoughts go in directions.  
  
“He,” you say, and stop some more, thinking about it. If you do this, are you fucking up?  
  
Your pan considers on this and sends back FUCK IT.  
  
“So it’s a guy!” They lean in closer. Some of them look as fuzzy and sleepy and good-feeling as you feel. Fuck you’re so at chill right now. Panicking and shit is getting harder with every drink. This one is different from the other ones you’ve been having since the beginning of the night, right? It’s, like...sweeter. Making you dizzier in one cup than all the others have done since you started drinking hours ago.  
  
“He...” you wave a hand. Since last time you used it that arm seems to have gone and grown out a foot or two and your hand all the way out on the end of it--you almost smack a brother in the face. “--fuck, man.”  
  
“Nah, ‘s cool,” says whoever you almost hit, and you grin at each other all dizzy and stupid for a second or two before somebody jolts you a bit by the shoulder. “Uh, yeah, he. He’s. Real big, so fuckin’ strong, like,  _fuck_ \--and all...got such a...” you lock up tryin’ to figure whether you was gonna say somethin’ about his gorgeous perfect face that’s like a statue or his great big amazing horns like you hope you have someday or if you were headed away off to talk about his ass. You stare at your hand for a second and try to take another drink.  
  
Your cup’s empty.  
  
“My cup’s empty,” you say, sad, and someone takes it away from you and puts another one full in your hand so quick you hardly see them move. You drink out of it and cough--this ain’t what you had before either, but this one isn’t warm and sweet. Feels like drinking ice. “Uh...”  
  
“You were telling us what he’s got,” says one of them, and you can’t tell if she’s tryin’ not to laugh or if she’s keepin’ her voice low for awe of how totally fuckin’ sweet Kurloz is. You figure it’s the second thing. Makes sense. He’s so goddamn cool.  
  
“....got. Got a.” What’s he got? He’s got a lot of stuff. The second swallow of your drink goes down less burning, but still icy and your eyes water hard. Tastes better and better. “Got a...like t’...like, he hurts. Me. And I just...” you shiver all over at thinking it. “ _So_  fucking good.”  
  
What happens after is a lot of talking and a couple of them offer at killing whoever is hurting you and a couple more get for a couple seconds kinda pale on you until someone paps you and you snarl at them because no, you ain’t that drunk yet and you don’t ever want to be. You have to yell to get over them and there’s a lot of confuse and upset, and finally you get it all hashed out, he hurts you because you want it, need it, fucking  _love_  it, and you’re just fucked up that way. Everybody gets real excited at that instead, forgets your matesprit for now. One of them takes your hand and drags her claws at the inside of your arm and you’re halfway out of it enough to dig your claws at the arms of your chair and shiver all over and they all makes little surprised noises and then everybody talks at once again,  _so that’s why I couldn’t get you to yield with a joint-break the other night, so that’s where you keep getting scars from, so that’s why you leave so quick after you take a hit at one-on-ones_  and you nod and drink your ice-drink from hell.  
  
“...so that’s why they hurt the others more than you,” says Uderak, real quiet under the others, and he pats you on the shoulder. You can’t remember what he’s talkin’ about, but you can feel it push at your pan like a stormcloud threatenin’ the shit out of your moonlight night, and you don’t remember. Won’t fucking remember that. “...sorry, brother.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” you go, and blink. Everything is kinda fuzzy and dark at the corners. Weird. You need another drink to clear your pan out. Keepin’ your bulge in is becoming a real chore and your eyes won’t stick on what you want to look at. You’re gonna throw up. You feel  _so fucking great._  
  
“...brother?” someone repeats, and you take another big gulp of your drink and swallow it down hard. “Gamzee? Uh--shit, guys--”  
  
\--  
  
You wake up and you’re pretty sure you’re dying. Your pan feels cracked open like something busted out of it, your mouth tastes grosser ‘n all hells and you think if you move you’re probably gonna leave what little’s in your stomach all over the ground. Your  _horns_  feel bruised. The pain is not good pain. The pain makes your oculars feel like they’re gonna pop.  
  
You roll your head to one side just enough to look around and find that you are in your ‘coon, there’s like a whole armful of packaged-up water sitting next to you in the chilly slime with a note taped to it, and your mouth hurts like you burned it on hot food. Holy fuck.  
  
 _Gamzee_ , reads the note, and you have to squint to make out even that. Your pan throbs and you squeeze your eyes shut and open them and try again.   
  


_Gamzee,_

_Drink a lot of water, you’ll feel a little less shitty. Hurrel says sorry for handing you that Gill Burner, she forgot you were still just a pupa. Her words, not mine. I will make her apologize properly later. Please tell your giant sadistic matesprit not to kill us, whoever the fuck he is._

_See you in evening massacre,_

_Yettah._

  
You lie back, close your eyes (even that dim little glow on the sopor makes your eyes throb at you) and grab a bottle of water blind. Getting it down makes your stomach churn, but it washes some of the gross taste out of your mouth and when you finish it you do feel maybe actually just a little bit not as shitty. You get down another two bottles, and then you roll back over and get back to sleep.  
  
By the time you wake up your pan ain’t quite splitting open no more, but there again your mouth tastes motherfucking  _terrible_  and you have to piss really really bad. So lying around stops being an option. You lurch off slimy to your ablution block, do what you got to and end up dropping into your ablution chamber, turning the hot water on and lying around in the dribbly spray, waiting for your head to stop buzzing.  
  
And then of course you fall asleep, you have one of those fucking awful blood-and-screaming dreams where you kill and kill and can’t ever laugh at it—and you wake up and claw four big gashes in your ablution chamber wall.   
  
It’s a shitty evening, and it only gets worse when you finally haul yourself out of the water (ain’t a stand-up for Kurloz’s, but you can’t just haul your slimy buck-ass naked self over at his block and use his, can you?) look at your husk top and realize that you’re unpainted, half-naked, got your claws bleeding from clawing up your ablution chamber, and you’re late for daily devotions.  
  
You show up late, suffer the preacher to yell at you for interrupting everybody even though it makes your pan feel like he’s got you by both horns and he’s pulling in different directions, sink down on your knees as soon as he leaves you alone to get back to preaching, and pray like hell that if you never touch a single motherfuckin’ drink again, you’ll never deal with this shit again. No more drinking. Drinking ain’t fun in any way at all. You figure you probably felt worse when you came down off sopor, but you weren’t hardly in your own pan for that—they pumped you full of a bunch of other shit that you wouldn’t have to take over and over again like you did sopor, tied you down in the mediculler’s ward, and just left you there. You got over it soon enough. The whole thing was fuzzy and far-off as hell though, and this is way too close and feels  _totally motherfucking shitty_.  
  
You do see Yettah at massacre, so happens, and the big laughsassin who’s gotta be Hurrel. Hurrel don’t want to apologize, but she does apologize, when Yettah elbows her hard enough, because you may have  _barely_  enough salt water in your blood to get the dud gills and the joke-ass fins—it’s a bit less than half of you on fleet have got them—but you got gills enough that Gill-Burners work hard and cold on you. If you were a warm-blood, you’d just throw that shit back up or die, but sea stomachs are tougher and take tougher poisons and you took it just long enough to pass out. You let her apology go and don’t even hit her or anything, for part because you still feel really shitty. They wave when they go, though. You wave back just a touch late, and wonder at that they talked to you just because they wanted to, that they didn’t have to but they did anyway.   
  
Miracles.  
  
After that you get a meeting you hoped at more—the old man snags you in the hallway. He talks to you from a distance when there are oculars pinning you. Asks you why you’re walkin’ around insultin’ the mirthful with your lackluster look and your shitty-ass paint. Everybody winces at you and you laugh and tell him you got super fucking drunk last night, you had too much mirth and now you’re having your payback of suffering, as messiahs intended for you. Messiahs always require you to suffer, don’t they, your lordship? You’ll suffer gladly for the messiahs, your lordship.   
  
He gives you a look, feels dark and hot on your skin, and he tells you  _I’m sure you’ll suffer for them plenty, Makara_ , like a promise. You’re still sick as fuck and dizzy, and maybe that’s why just that, him not even touching you, makes your knees wobble.   
  
Everybody gives you those looks as he turns and walks away,  _wow bro, shitty luck, that was fuckin’ harsh_ , and you stare after him and nod, not really listening.  
  
“…I think he likes you,” says a quiet voice, and you about jump out of your skin. Little one-eyed Uderak is standing behind you, him as came to help break you out when you were captured. He’s looking at you, and at Kurloz as he walks away, and for the first time you get a feeling like someone knows something about you that you didn’t figure they’d ever figure out.   
  
“I,” you say.  
  
“…he’s your ancestor,” says Uderak. “Isn’t he?”  
  
Oh.  
  
Oh, right, yeah, people would pick up on that first, wouldn’t they? Fucking hell, you were panicking there for a second. (What the hell would you even say, if someone guessed that? What _could_  you say?)  
  
“…yeah,” you say. “I figure so. Same sign and all.”  
  
“You look the same when you’re fighting, too,” he says, and you take a little jump of surprise at that, because you hadn’t figured yourself anything like good enough for something like that. “—he’s a lot better than you, though,” he finishes, and you relax again. The world is right. “And you have the same horns and the same creepy-ass grin, it’s not hard to figure out when you get your pan wrapped around, brother.”  
  
“Not trying to keep it a secret,” you say. “Not my lookout if someone figures it out.”   
  
He gives you a look and then shrugs. “…then there’s some other secret,” he says. “…because I know the look of a troll with secrets, my motherfucker. I’m getting my schoolfeed on in interrogation and inquisition for that reason, since I got the feeling in my soul and pusher that that’s where my calling is. I got a wicked hunger for  _secrets_ , brother. And you got one.”  
  
He leaves you there staring after him, and you got not a slightest hint on what you should say to that. It is motherfucking concerning to you. You search your head for what you ought to do about that, and you come up on scripture, nice and clear and clean.  _When your feet are unsure and what comes on you is un-fucking-funny, seek you holy suffering in penance._    
  
That means go see Kurloz, right?  
  
Yeah, you figure you can do that, and it has nothing to do with as how you’re standing funny and still achy and sick and want holding. You straighten your shit up, and go running after him.  
  
\--  
  
You reach the door just as a whole lot of other people go out of it real fast. They see you standing there waiting to go in—a couple of them shake their heads at you, a few more tell you _no, don’t go in there, you don’t want to go in there._  
  
“What?” You ask, and before they can answer you open the door a crack and look in.  
  
Something hits the door so hard it slams shut again and almost takes your head off.   
  
“…what the  _fuck_?” You correct yourself, and they look at each other and then you. Kurloz ain’t makin’ noise in there, but you can hear him anyway, his footsteps and his fists hitting things. You’d rather he was screaming at someone. You know things on him no other does—you know not like any other motherfucker would know that Kurloz is loud when he’s pissed but he’s  _quiet_ when he’s hurting. “What did you motherfuckin’ do?!”  
  
“—we had to,” says one of them, “—we had to tell him, we—”  
  
“Sister Tresor is dead,” blurts out another of them, and you jump a little, taken back at that. Tresor who taught you scripture class? Tresor who you saw…just a couple nights ago, she said she was headed out—just a routine patrol, she said. She joked she would leave you in charge of scripture class, since you saw fit to get such a strong grade at it.   
  
“ _He’s not happy_ ,” mutters the one who first spoke. “…he’s…he’s very unhappy.”  
  
“No fucking?” You shove past them, and suddenly you are angry. Anger comes on you sudden-like, overtakes the churn of your guts and the ache of your head and changes them to something else, hotter and darker and you want to snap at their throats. It scares what remains of you as you are normally, the soft and quiet part, but you ain’t listening to that part. You bubble with rage. “Very unhappy?! You are  _fucking_ with me! So we leave him, right? Fuck you. Go on and  _motherfucking run_  then!”  
  
You open the door, and close it on their yells.  
  
It’s dark inside—there are always lanterns hanging down, but they’re crushed, pulled out of the air and smashed on the floor by angry hands. There’s glass on the ground.  
  
Kurloz is hunched in his throne when you walk in, and he doesn’t seem to see you, hear you, know you’re even motherfucking there. He don’t look up at you. Just sits and stares down at his feet. His hands got blood smeared on them. His feet the same. You step around the glass and kneel in front of him without thinking on it, you done it so many times. He doesn’t say a word.  
  
“… _I_ …” you say, and all your rage and sureness kinda drains off you, betrays you and fucks off right when you needed it.   
  
He don’t wait for you to figure out what you want to say.   
  
“ _Tresor’s gone_ ,” he says, and there’s a darkness and a hollow pit behind those words. He leans down, props his elbows on his knees and reaches to pull glass away from his feet, slow, all jerky. His hand keeps moving while he talks. “Three hundred sweeps faithful and fucking fearless and all it took was—” he sits up, pulls his finger across his throat like a blade, slits his choke and drops it again. “… _three hundred sweeps_ ,” he says again. “…could’ve had three hundred more even, three hundred more  _at least_.”  
  
“…messiahs bless,” you say, hush in the presence of her leaving, and it ain’t enough with the pain so keen in him but it’s a thing as needs to be said. The faithful’s prayers smooth the way for those of them as gone on, the messiahs hear you and judge less harsh. (It would be a cruel thing, it would be a terror and loneliness as you can’t contemplate, to be the last of your faith—nobody to know your death or pray for your soul. You’d run from death forever because a faithful without his brothers and sisters is worth no more to the messiahs than the shitbloods they trample under their feet.) “…sorry,” you say, and that’s from you to him, no gods or prayers.   
  
He waves it off. “You ain’t the hands as got her  _killed_ ,” he says, and he smiles but it’s cold. “That’s the honor, goes with sittin’ in this throne.”  
  
Fuck.  
  
“Kurloz,” you say, and try to figure as what you even want to say to him. What you even  _can_  say to him. “…you—we’re not…”  
  
“Ain’t like it was even a good death,” he says, bursts out of him real sharp and sudden. “Didn’t die of fire and blood and noise, nothing messiahs would laugh at, just a slit throat and left to bleed out on the ground,  _THREE HUNDRED MOTHERFUCKING SWEEPS—_ ”  
  
You got nothing you can do to comfort him, so you just come forward to him, lean up and put your arms to him. You hold him on tight, and he goes still. He’s shaking, but not of fear, you think, or upset of that kind. He’s angry. He is so, so angry.  
  
“ _…hail messiahs both,”_  you whisper at him, and he makes a little noise you don’t quite understand and lets you hold onto him.  
  
“… _hail,_ ” he replies, and it sounds tired and sad and old and motherfucking painful. “… _hail messiahs both._ ”  
  
“ _Brothers and sisters here and gone on_ ,” you start, real soft against his shoulder, and the words are older even than him, you’ve said them hundreds of hundreds of times, but never like this. “ _Bow your heads right the fuck down and lift your hearts up at prayin’ with me._ ”  
  
And he does. You bow heads, hold onto each other tight and you hear him pray as you do, for light and glory and a kind face turned on you and yours, for the deaths that have been and will yet be, and you hear his voice rise for a second, break for a second, “— _any mercy—safe, keep him_ —” and you are broken open for the pity of him.  
  
When you kiss him he squeezes you sudden and hard, and he kisses you back with hunger and in pain. Doesn’t touch you, doesn’t try to do anything else so ever, just kisses and holds tight as tight.   
  
“Just,” he tells you, “—don’t you go anywhere, don’t you dare leave before time’s come, don’t you fucking  _dare—_ ”  
  
“ _Swear I won’t,_ ” you tell him, and he makes a noise like a growl and presses his face between your horns. “You ain’t ever seen a ninja so careful as me, come on. I remember last time.” And he makes another unhappy noise at that, so you kiss him some more, words slipping in between you. “— _swear I won’t, not goin’ anywhere, I’ll be okay, I’ll_ remember—”  
  
“Nothing the both of us can do to stop it,” he says, tired and slow. “Not if it’s messiahs’ wills. That’s what—” he breathes deep, and you think he’s glad you can’t see his face. You notice, how he keeps your head pressed close to him, how he doesn’t let you look at him as his voice grows terrible and soft. “… _’s what scares the fuck out of me, little one._  She knew better than you know, strong and ready the sister was, and it was that fast that she was gone.”  
  
Three hundred sweeps. You think on knowing someone for  _three hundred sweeps_ , on them just… _not being there_  anymore, and fuck, it scares you too, but you scare yourself more at thinking…thinking on…how if she was so old and they still got to her…ain’t nobody invincible then.   
  
You think about what the world would be if you lost him, and the two of you hold on to each other in silence for a while, because while you’re here, just the two of you, ain’t a thing can take him from you, and ain’t nobody can take you from him.  
  
\--  
  
You don’t realize you’ve been holding on so long that the kid is falling asleep on you until he starts shivering in your arms, twisting and growling. You can take his night terrors, ain’t nothing he can do to you that you can’t take, even with him growin’ bigger and stronger. But you still don’t want him there in your arms and shaking like that. Just because you can bear his dreams don’t mean you should make him do the same.   
  
You rub up and down his back real slow and he shifts and quiets a little. And then you take your hand away and he makes the tiniest and saddest sound and FUCKING HELL—  
  
Gamzee, you discover ain’t got claws too terrible sharp, but he  _does_  have a bite like a motherfucker. You make a loud noise of shock at him as he chews hard into your shoulder and he jumps and wakes up all in one go with a noise you feel more than hear. His teeth pull out of your arm; he goes backwards fast and staggering. You catch him before he can go back off your throne and over the glass on bare feet, grab him by one arm and yank him back up against you so hard you almost lift him off the ground. He flails around—stares at you, licks his lips, runs a hand over his mouth and stares at his fingers, and looks at you like a heretic about to beg for his life. He is panic and alarm. You are strangely amused at him, and you grin, almost laughing.  
  
“Bad dream?”  
  
He makes noises. Trolls just fresh from sleep ain’t the wordiest, and he always does get noisy and wordless easier than most. Fuck, your feet hurt. You stepped on some glass, didn’t you? God. That shit needs cleaned then.   
  
In the rest of the time though, you just gather him back up again, all his skinny arms and legs up into your lap.   
  
“Can’t have you cutting up your feet,” you remind him, and he looks down at yours and frowns.   
  
“You,” he says, and trails off. Blinks at you. Shakes his head and blinks again, hard. “…you, you’re bleeding.”  
  
“Yeah,” you say. “Reckon so. You should clean ‘em up for me.”  
  
\--  
  
It turns out, when you get limped into your block and sat down and tell him where the shit is you use to patch shit up, he doesn’t know the first stupidest thing about taking care of a wound. You’re surprised and you know you shouldn’t be, because of course he doesn’t. That’s just the kind of shit you should have learned to expect by now. You pull out what he needs for him, and hand them down.  
  
“This first,” you tell him, and give him the disinfectant—he looks at it like he ain’t ever seen it before in his life and you wouldn’t be too shocked if that was true. “Anything dirty or deep enough to bandage, you clean the shit out of it with that stuff, you motherfucking attend?”   
  
“Just…put it on there?” He screws the cap off, looks at your feet like you’re a battle needs winning.   
  
“Yeah,” you say, “—but mind that you  _fffuck._ ”  
  
…yeah, he just slops it all over your foot,  _fuck_. That stings. You don’t let on—you’re too old for cringing like a wriggler over a little pain like that—but you jump and wince a little bit just from the sudden shock of it. He flinches too when it hisses in the raw flesh, and he catches your wince and is taken with horror. “Sorry!” He pulls the bottle away and hovers, not sure what to do, scared of hurting you. You have to sigh. The pain is fading already and for all he looks on you like you’re so fearsome and great, he thinks of you awful fragile. “Sorry, sorry, you didn’t say it—”  
  
“I’ve felt worse, wriggler,” you point out, and he makes an unhappy noise.   
  
“Yeah,” he says, “…but that wasn’t me doing that. I don’t—don’t like…” he stops. You remember on sitting together, not an hour ago, being glad of each other, dreading the handmaid together, and you sigh and let it go.   
  
“I know, I know,” you say, gentler. You curl your toes and spread them out again—stings, but you’re not bleeding anymore. “…my job to hurt you, not the other way around. It’s done, anyway. Finish up.” You get him some bandages and those he understands, at least. He sets to and you watch him and think.  
  
The thing is.  
  
The thing that motherfucking is, is that you ain’t gonna live forever. And your not-forever is set to end considerable sooner than his. If he lives the same great length of sweeps as you, you still have to think that he’ll live as long without you as you have without him, and his moirail gone long, long before. He will hurt himself, you know he will, and you’ll be damned if he’s left and not knowing how, what to do, how to clean what he’s done so it won’t fester. How to stitch up what he’s done so it only scars where he wants. You want to take care of wounds you won’t ever see or touch, and it’s fucking stupid.   
  
You want what you want, you guess. No point telling yourself you ain’t getting motherfucking soppy about this, because you always did have a touch of sentimental about you. Too taken with the gesture, you always were. Made a show of the execution, didn’t you? To teach those fuckers who thought messiahs could walk on petty earth and wear flawed troll flesh. Maybe it wasn’t what should have been done, maybe it made a martyr of him, but you couldn’t fucking  _handle_ that sort of rude shit being done to your scriptured truth. So gestures you made, and a show of it. Not that the cuffs was your thought, cuffs were mostly Meenah’s, but—  
  
“…Kurloz?”  
  
You blink and look down again. He’s looking up at you, and—oh. He does know how to use a bandage, you’ll say that of him. Uses enough for making up for all the other shit he never did to his wounds, you bet. You can’t move your toes, but you sure as fuck ain’t bleeding anymore. He has truly taken care of that aspect at least.  
  
“Yeah,” you say. “What.”  
  
He looks down at his bandages and back up at you. “…sorry,” he says again, and you reach down and mess up his hair.  
  
“Looks fine to me,” you tell him, and he brightens up a little. “Just…thinking.”  
  
He nods and stands up, and for a second with you sitting and him standing over you, he is far taller than you expected. How old is he now, eleven? Eleven almost? Twelve? Something like. He takes your hands and his fingers might be a knuckle shorter than yours, no more than that.   
  
“…you cut up your hands, too,” he says.  
  
“Scratches,” you say, because they are, they’re of no concern. He goes  _hmm._  “Come on, give me some credit, little one. They ain’t even bleedin’.”  
  
He nods, finally, giving in, and drops your hand again. He looks at his feet. Hesitates a second.  
  
“Spit it out, wriggler,” you push him, and he turns purple under his paint.   
  
“Just…wonderin’. He stops a second and chews his lip. When he starts again, his voice is that much softer. “…wonderin’…whether you…who’s gonna teach scripture now.”  
  
Oh.  
  
The hurt and the angry and the fear try to come back at you, thinkin’ about it—you shake them off and away. It’s a good question. Question you’d have to think on some time. Fuck though, who could teach a scripture feed like Hunahn Tresor? She’d had every word burned into her pan, nobody else you know has got…  
  
“She joked at me like it could be me,” he says, and settles down on the ground by your bandaged-up feet, lookin’ off all mournful at the distance. “Said since as my grades was so good, as I got them stuck in my pan so tight, I should be the one as took over after her. Last thing she said to me.”  
  
“…did she now,” you say, and you think on how well the new wrigglers seem to get on with him and how they like his sermons. “…did she motherfucking really.”  
  
He’s young to be a teacher yet, but you think on it and you wonder if…maybe some other day. Some day later, when he’s big enough nobody’ll fight him for a spot so important to the church. You don’t want another fight happening like when you had to replace one of your combat teachers. Even if you would love to see someone get in a scripture slam-off over the spot with Gamzee. He would trash their ass total and solid and leave nothing behind. Shit would be legendary.  
  
“…maybe in a couple sweeps,” you say, enjoying that picture, and he looks surprised and then pleased and kind of maybe a little bit scared. “Give it time, wriggler. Give it time. Gotta at least hit second pupation before I put anything bigger than a congregation in your hands.”  
  
“Aw,” he says, and he gives you big-ass, fake shiny eyes. “Don’t even motherfuckin’ trust me? Your own spawn.”  
  
“Never trust a Makara,” you tell him. “I seen one or two others over a few hundred sweeps. More some other fucker than me, but some as got the name got other things too. Horns. Hands. Eyes.” You hold up a hand. “…crooked-ass little fingers,” you say, and he spreads out his fingers and grins at them, his smallest fingers just a little bent like yours are. “None of them like you. You’re my blood whole and entire, horns to toes.”  
  
You look at each other, and both of you together know what the other one thinks then, that there ain’t a word for what you’re doin’, but that maybe it’s stranger than most, than anything anybody’s ever done before. That maybe there’s something fucked up about this.  
  
But you’ll be damned and done if you actually fucking care.  
  
“Same pretty face, too,” you finish, and he blushes first and grins second when the joke hits him. “Got horns that’ll be the envy of the fleet, little one, I should know.” You get a lot of looks for your horns, and for your scars and your height—a troll who lives so long as you, there’s plenty to hate about you, plenty to pity. But you pity best when you’re wrenching out the vulnerable softness of someone, and your truest most terrible self you can only show that moment when you hurt someone and there ain’t nobody whose ever been able to put up with that yet.   
  
Only him.  
  
Fuck, you’re getting maudlin with the long day. You yawn long and slow and lean back and look around. Shit you should do before you sleep, but you don’t want to and fuck it, you don’t have to. Not tonight. “…go to ‘coon,” you tell him, and he groans.   
  
“It’s so fucking early yet though, sun ain’t hardly—”  
  
“Do you some good to go to bed when it’s barely light out for once,” you order him, stern and solid. “You think on what I said about pupation back there, well it’s coming up on you. Sleep, you idiot. Eat, drink, sleep, now ain’t the time to be fucking around with your body.” You think on how that sounded and crack a grin. “…that’s my job.”  
  
He and you snigger a bit at that. “Hey,” he says, and pokes at you. “Hey, Kurloz.”  
  
“Gamzee, go to—”  
  
“No, I’m gonna!” He don’t though, just scoots up closer to you. “Hey but just before I go, you hear about the blueblood motherfucker who walked into a brown farm by accident?”  
  
You hadn’t, and when he tells you you just about bust your gut laughing and honor the joke by socking him on the back of the head. Ain’t everyday you get a joke, deserves a punchline ending, but in the space after your bitter unhappy mood you are taken by a laughing mood instead and you find that motherfucking  _hilarious._  
  
“ _Fucking—moobeasts_ ,” you snort when you finally get breath, and you both about keel over laughing again. “They fucking  _do_ , too, pompous little shitbags—”  
  
It takes you an hour or two to stop telling each other stupid-ass jokes and send him to ‘coon, and when he’s gone away you pray a last time for your sister’s soul and get to sleep too.  
  
And then next day you’re seeing cases in your throne-room, and things go…motherfuckin’ _strange._  
  
Little brother Uderak has honors of you, since he went on the mission with you to go after Gamzee. You see him slide in and come forward to your throne, and you let go some of your straight-back, high-horn arrogance. He's proven himself worthy of enough regard for that, at least.  
  
“Night, little brother,” you say, and he comes forward, kneels to you and stands.   
  
“Milord Grand Highblood,” he says, and…hesitates. Interesting. You always love to see someone hesitate—means there’s something to find out here.  
  
“Speak,” you say, firm and loud enough to be an order, and he jumps.   
  
“Yes milord,” he says. “…I…I want to, I want to request permission to perform inquisition.”  
  
Huh. You got a good memory—you search back of what you know about him. “…you done plenty inquisition time,” you point out. “Had good words of you, you got talents in that area, so I heard.”  
  
He ducks his head and grins a bit—in this area especially, your compliment is good currency. Then he clears his throat and nods. “But,” he says, “…but I got…a different kind of inquisition in mind, milord. A kind true and motherfucking unusual. A kind…ain’t got no torture in it, ain’t for conviction of a heretic or anything. And…” and this time he really stops, choked on the words. “…and…” he says, like he don’t want to. “…and I want to inquisite…on the subject of a brother of my very own.”  
  
You sit up hard and fast at that. Maybe he sees the look on your face—he ducks in another bow.   
  
“Meaning no hurt to him!” he says, almost pleading, “—just to find a secret of him, I just got a powerful curiosity and—and I know this is a brother as you are…greatly taken to, milord—fuck. I swear to all Messiahs, milord, I just want to find out a secret, and I wouldn’t ever hurt him to do it.”  
  
You have a terrible thought of what he wants to find out. You keep it off your face. “…secrets of your family, those are secrets of their own,” you say, buying yourself thinking time. “I should give you let to take and give away your own church’s—”  
  
“I wouldn’t ever spread it!” he looks motherfucking insulted at the merest thought. “Sir, he’s my _brother_. I gave my eye for him, wouldn’t betray that trust now.”  
  
It’s not a shock, but it still makes your bones jolt in you. You don’t take a breath to calm down. You don’t move. You just look at him.  
  
“…I,” says Uderak, and you can see the moment he gives up on being careful. “—I—know he’s your descendent, milord, I figured that much out, but there’s something he’s hiding and I  _need_ that secret, I have a…a hunger for them.”  
  
Well, he’s not the only motherfucker who knows. But those as were there when you let out that he was yours…they were old and they knew when secrets were for keeping. And the secret that he was your descendant, they were wise enough to keep that among themselves, looks like, if he still thinks it’s such a big and deadly secret.   
  
But you think you know what that secret he’s after is. And if someone like this wriggler goes after it, even with no tools of hurting in his hands, you don’t think it’ll be long before all and sundry are well-fucking-aware of what you get up to with your descendant in secret times alone.   
  
It would be…such a motherfucking relief.  
  
But the shit it would stir up, can you wager that? There’s nothing about this that’s wrong, not really, there’s nothing to be ashamed at, and you aren’t ashamed—but you wonder, how this will go.   
  
Could be funny.  
  
“…I’ll think on it,” you say. “Inquisition of your own family, that’s…a heavy request, brother.” You pause a second, and decide. “…give me time to convince myself on that,” you promise, and his face brightens under his paint. “Come back after dawn. You’ll get your answer.”  
  
He goes. You give it thirty seconds to make sure he’s gone, and then you snatch your husktop out of your syllabus, open up the imperial network top priority, and find Gamzee’s account with a hand that wants to just barely shake.  
  
\--  
  
“Well fuck,” says Gamzee, after the whole thing is hashed out for him. “…he said it to me too, he’d find me out, but…well fuck.”  
  
“Yeah.” You both sit there, thinking about it.   
  
“…but…” he stops for a second. “…but I…wouldn’t it be…fuckin’ sweet, though, maybe. Not hidin’.”  
  
“We never hid,” you say, even though it’s the same very thought you had when the question came to you. “We never fucked in public, ain’t mean it was a secret.”   
  
He opens his mouth, and you  _see_  him get caught on the words  _‘fucked in public_ ’. It takes him a second to remember how to do words. “But,” he says. “—uh. But—uh…”  
  
“Yeah,” you say, gentling. “I know. It would be…motherfuckin relieving.”  
  
“So,” he says.  
  
“So.”  
  
You look at each other, and the two of you both know what the answer is.  
  
“I’ll give him his permissions then,” you say, and he nods, chewing at his lip. You catch his lip with your thumb to make him stop and he blows out a sigh through his nose and licks your finger instead. “Quit that, you. I know we got a debt at our brother, but don’t make it too easy on him, yeah?”  
  
“Yeah.” He gives you a look, long and strange and weirdly hard to read. “…big brother,” he says plaintively, and that is wriggler-sweet and precious of him. You ain’t had him call that before. “…things are gonna change again.”  
  
“We got hundreds of sweeps,” you say, with no room for him to argue that. “…if we don’t like it…we’ll just change it again.”


	11. You Wake Up

_AN: Minor issues uploading this chapter last time--this ought to fix them! :T  If there's still something messed up, let me know okay?_

* * *

 

You don’t see brother Uderak doin’ nothing for a while there, except for people who ain’t him seem more interested by your quadrants all of a sudden. Testing you to see if you’ll talk on it freely, you think, but he knows…that you know…that he..  
  
Fuck, that’s too many people knowin’ shit.  Point is, he’s tryin’ to get at you by other brothers and sisters. Tryin’ to see if you’re suspicious on him, after that party. He don’t know Kurloz would tell you right that minute when he asked for permission to figure out your quadrants, he figures he’s got the jump on you. Figures all you got to worry about is the thing about you and pain.  
  
That’s one thing that does come and get at you. It gets a little weird sparring at people and they kind of pull their hits a little bit, you can feel it. You get fuckin’ tired of it real fast, and you pull one of them aside and give them what’s true on that, now that you’re not drunk—that hurting you just like that ain’t going to set you humping the teacher or some shit, that getting knocked around casual-like isn’t gonna do it for you and they can just spread that on the down and low, okay.  
  
It must get around, because after a week or two of really motherfucking shitty sparring, they finally go back to fighting for real.  
  
The other thing that starts happening is people start, like…making moves at you.  
  
You’d figure they’d  _not_  do that after you let slip so much about Kurloz at the party, but that just seems to have made folks real… _curious_. They’ll do a bit of stuff, then when you don’t get that they’re flirting at you (the fuck is flirting, you can’t figure out how you’re supposed to fucking tell without them saying it straight out like “hey let’s fuck, no spades,” or some shit) then they look at you sideways and go “Oh shit! You have a matesprit, don’t you? I guess I’ll just stay out of his way for a while, ahahahaha, what does he look like so I can avoid him?”  
  
You tell them “tall”, and walk away before you can put your hoof in your mouth. You tell them “he got super fine-ass horns” and that’s all. You tell them “he got scars under his paint” and then realize you just gave out that you’re seeing each other paintless and they go “ooooOOOHHHHHH!” and run off to spread that choice fact around. You get to be…kind of a joke, but not that way as means people don’t take you seriously—folks just tell jokes. You and your mystery matesprit.   
  
Such a motherfucking mystery as he is, people mutter doubt that he even exists—and then you walk out of a closed hallway where he had you up against the wall and kissed you hard enough your lip caught his fangs, and when you close the door behind you and turn around there’s a brother standing there and staring right at you. Your hair all messed up, your lip bleeding, your breath coming hard and your paint smeared around the mouth, and you do the only thing you can think of and give them your nastiest glare and a hiss with all your teeth. They take to their heels.  
  
Nobody says you’re lying about your quadrants again.   
  
“I wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t told me,” says Karkat, blurry on his screen. It’s day, morning after you almost got caught. Your palest brother looks tired as all hell and there’s a big bandage wrapped around his head because he says someone took a chunk out of his ear, but he still stays up to deal with your stupid fucking problems and you don’t deserve him. “I bet even if this snakey creepy douchehole figures it out, he doesn’t fucking believe what he finds out. You’ll see, it’ll be fine. Anyway, who’s going to tell the Grand Highbitch he can’t fuck whoever he wants?”  
  
“…yeah, fucking,” you say, and you drop yourself down and put your chin on your arms, wish you had your paint on to cover up how hot your face is. “… _what about…bein’ flushed for, though_?”  
  
He opens his mouth to say something—thinks better and closes it again.  
  
“…Pretty sure it’s none of their business who you’re flushed for,” he says, finally. “Or who’s flushed for you. It’s a little bit weird, fucking—or being flushed for, fine, okay, I know, you don’t have to correct me every time—your own ancestor. Sure. But wouldn’t it…” he waves his fronds around, thinking on things he don’t understand, and tries, “…make your bullshit clown gods laugh? Something like that sounds like their kind of fucked-up _japery_.” He spits the word like it’s poison and you have to laugh a little—he does try.   
  
“…could be,” you allow. You didn’t think on that, of messiahs laughing at you, that this could be funny to them, but why else would they make two like you two? Or like you and Karkat? Your quadrants are your joke to the messiahs, that you would be so perfectly flushed, blood and soul for your own ancestor—that a highblood like you would be the other pale half of a mutant red diamond. Yeah. That…that makes a deal of sense from some shit that you didn’t ever have the means to figure out before.  
  
“…wow,” you say, kinda hushed, in the moment of you realizing. “…that shit is downright motherfucking  _theologic._ ”  
  
“What, seriously?” He snorts and rubs his eyes. “—It’s bullshit, is what it is. But whatever.”  
  
“No, that helps!” You smile at him real big, and he gives you a little sliver of teeth back, turns his mouth up just a little bit at the edges. “You don’t gotta believe to do miracles, best friend,” you tell him, all your heart and soul. “You just gone and proved it, just now.”  
  
“You’re a credulous leaky-panned shithead,” he says at you, and you grin and hold up your half of the diamond. Two fingers. He holds up his too—across distance longer than you can count, you touch fingertips.   
  
“Get your head down and make at sleeping, brother,” you tell him, and he huffs and sits up. “Close those pretty motherfuckin’ eyes. I’ll talk at you next I got time.”  
  
“Since when are you the one giving advice on good sleeping habits?” He grumbles at you, but he gets up and starts moving around, getting himself ready. His voice gets fainter and farther as he moves around—you lean head on hands and listen at it. “… _dumbass clown—all hours of the day—my ass—_ miracles _, god dammit…_ ”  
  
You say good mornings and then he’s gone, and you pull yourself off to your ‘coon and lie awake in it, watch the numbers glowing that tell you what time it would be far away on home planet. It was deemed funny by the motherfuckin’ messiahs, your dad to die on that beach, and you didn’t get it then, but you had faith, didn’t you? And that hurt so fucking bad in every wrong way you could ever get in your thinkpan and all, but you still believed. And this hurts so much better and more right, so why shouldn’t it be a joke you get, for once? Why shouldn’t the gods give you something your own?   
  
\--  
  
 _Snap._  
  
It’s that easy, when that’s that. Hand clenches, neck breaks. Body falls and stop trying to claw at you. Overhead, the lights go on and the winding walls of metal around you light up.  
  
“Aaaaaand Makara’s got it,” says the watcher’s voice, and everywhere around you hear your brothers and sisters groan.   
  
“Too good at this game, Gamzee!” somebody yells over the big slice of steel next to you, and you honk at him and then jump when he slams a fist on the steel and it booms real close and loud by your ear. “Come on, make him play one-handed!”  
  
“I killed this one one-handed anyway!”   
  
“Motherfuckin’ showoff,” says a sister a little further off, but it’s all for good fun and you pick up the body and tear at it with your claws until you get a good smear of teal out of it. You put your print on the wall, on top of thousands of thousands of others, and haul the body off back to the start again. The others are all coming around the door too, all in black with nothing on them but their signs. The watcher drops down out of his room that looks down over all of you and takes a good poke at the body.  
  
“Yeah, that’s a dead shitblood,” he says. “Okay, who’s watching now?”  
  
“I’ll,” you start, and everybody shouts you down.  
  
“You’re playing, so somebody can fucking beat you,” says Yettah—she almost had that kill, but looks like the shitblood raked her face and ducked away in the dark. She looks pissed. “We’ll get you eventually!”  
  
The new watcher comes forward—got slammed into a wall last round and doesn’t feel like playin’ for a bit until his arm starts feelin’ again. He climbs up to his room, looking down. “Target’s a yellow this time,” he says down to you all gathered below, a big voice on all the speakers around the room full of metal maze-walls. “Swordkind! Letting her out in ten. Nine. Eight. Seven…”  
  
When he hits five, the lights go out and you’re all runnin’. There’s six doors they could let the next prisoner in by—you get to the center of the maze, crouch down real quiet, and listen. The others don’t’ seem to give that any thought, really. They sneak around all quiet, real good laughsassins and all, but they don’t stop and they don’t try to hear. You hold as still as you can be, and you listen.  
  
You feel the twinge of fear almost as much as you hear the soft little hiss of the door opening. To your right. Gate of Sacrament. You crack your knuckles and set out.   
  
You’ve got a fast one here. You almost lose her for a second, and then someone yells out in pain and you’re turning again, listening, following the noise of running. Came through Sacrament, but she’s doubling back, headed more at Suffering. You saw Yettah’s big palemate Hurrel head that way, two of them hunt together and corner the prey. Fuck. You double down in the dark and run faster.   
  
“Five minutes!” the watcher’s voice makes you jump. You hear someone else hit the metal next to you and stop, panting—a faint symbol, can’t make out the shape but the color is purple. “Releasing the target’s psi inhibitors, happy motherfuckin’ hunting!”  
  
And the body against the wall next to you lights up in yellow sparks.  
  
The yellowblood draws her sword, and you see a too-big black shirt, shredded and stolen, a purple sign hiding her yellow from your brothers and sisters in the game with you. She looks at her yellow-bright hands, and up at you, and 

 

  
you wake up.  
  
It’s dark and hot and the air is rank with blood and piss and fear. Can’t hardly feel your hands chained up over your head, but you feel them on either side of you, your brothers and sisters, their blood smeared over your skin. Can’t breathe on one side of your chest for the cold metal shoved through your aeration sac, can’t speak for how dry your mouth and the places they took a knife to you ache all over and with every move. One of them is bent over you, hot hands on your face, slapped your face and woke you up.  
  
 _like this one was dreaming something_ nice _,_ “ they say, and everything swims. Someone is shaking you. Someone is yelling. Blood. It’s quiet. It’s dark, it’s hot, it stinks of fear and you want Kurloz, you want Kurloz-- “ _Nobody’s coming for you, freak, we’re gonna get him too, we’re gonna get_ all of you _and you’ll all end up like_ this _\--_ “ Someone is shaking you, there’s yelling, there’s cold metal against your back, it’s stifling-hot and smells of pain and your brothers and sisters are in fear--you try not to think but they keep  _whispering_  at you and you imagine every brother and sister you ever prayed with tied up and bleeding, a vast figure with horns like yours brought low and chained down so even he can’t break free, howling _don't touch him don't fucking touch him_ and keening agony that’s not real he’s not here  _that’s not real--_  
  
They ask questions that blur one over another, you can’t tell what they’re asking and when you can’t answer they break fingers, they do things soft and slick and wet that make your family scream for mercy and you can’t remember how to pray except his name, can’t remember words except--  
  
“Gamzee!”

 

  
  
You wake up.  
  
There are faces over you and hands on your shoulders, your face is soaked wet with tears and your throat is hoarse and raw like you’ve been screaming. Lights on again. Everyone sighs relief to see you back, and you get enough of you together to take stock of yourself and look around you--there’s a slice across your chest that burns like fire and your head feels like it’s gonna explode from the inside out.  
  
“Holy shit,” says one of the brothers you don’t know. “Holy motherfuckin’ shit.”  
  
You try to ask--comes out a tiny little wheeze, not even a sound. Someone’s modus flashes around and then there’s a water bottle pressing at your lips, tilting water down your throat.  
  
The yellowblood lies next to you on the ground. Side of her skull stoved in. Someone pulled a weapon. ‘S against the rules.  
  
“... _the_ fuck?” You ask, when you can breathe again, and they sit you up against the wall. Your pan feels five sizes too big for you. “Wh’ happen?”  
  
“Got you with her psi,” says somebody, and you close your eyes against the light and groan. It’s like being hung over but worse. “We quit the game when we...” some awkward seconds of quiet. “...when we heard you screaming.”  
  
Fuck, you figured you had, but hearing that shit said is downright embarrassing. The old scars on you from your first mission ache.  
  
“Sliced you up pretty good, too,” somebody says, and looks up past you--you hear feet and turn just when a brother you only know from the games drops down next to you and pulls a box out of his modus. You see the bottle, the one Kurloz had you put on his feet--fuck, this is gonna hurt. But he just dabs it on, and you’re ready for the bite of it--you chew your tongue and don’t make a noise. “Khalse found you first, broke her freak pan. We were worried, bro, we thought you weren’t waking up.”  
  
“Nngh,” you say instead of words. Wow, fuck you’re bleeding kind of a shitload. And you got a lot of blood in you, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to just pour it out over everything. The brother with the box of mediculler shit pulls a tube of somethin’ and puts it in and some of the bleeding slows off. “--how long--?”  
  
“No more than half a motherfuckin’ minute,” says the one they called Khalse, satisfied as hell. Can’t tell at a glance if they’re a brother or sister--maybe they like it that way, some do. Some both. Not a faithful’s place to ask or judge--that’s them and the messiahs hashing that shit out. Regardless, they got a big club out; only the one, but it’s a lot bigger than your couple of little ones you use two at a time. Would crush the thickest motherfuckin’ thinkpan as easy as Kurloz snapping a finger. “Shitblood never saw it comin’.”  
  
Mediculler brother pulls out thread and little curved needle “...this is gonna sting like a bitch, bro,” he starts to warn you, but somebody nudges him and talks quiet in his ear a little. You close your eyes so you don’t have to watch his face.  
  
“...oh,” he says, after a time. “...’kay. Well, it’s still gonna hurt. Hold still.”  
  
It does hurt, a bit--and in the space after all that terror, your body is still runnin’ everything on high and full and you can’t get yourself to not be jumpy no more. The little stings of the needle hit you harder than a slap right in the motherfuckin’ face. Gotta think on something else. Gotta think on something not the pain.  
  
“...she get anybody else?” You don’t see nobody else bleeding or down or anything--yeah, she’d had the psionic...thing, the thing that shuts her off so’s she can’t make trouble for you. They’d only just shut it off, and there you were right in front of her as like you had a target painted on you as bright as your moirail’s blood. People take a count and report back that no, ain’t nobody else down for the count. Just you. Well motherfuck. “We know she could do that?”  
  
"Sort of, looks like,” says the watcher--he’s down from his room--looks bad. Real small and sorry. “Sorry, brother.”  
  
“Nah motherfucker.” Too tired for all that shit now.  
  
“...looks like they saw her tryin’ for some kind of psi attack when they caught her,” he says, and looks at his palmhusk, “...but they knocked her out and put the inhibitor on her before she could go for it? Did she...what the fuck did it even do? Just hurt? Didn’t...not quite sound like screaming you get when shit hurts.” There’s a lot of nodding--you all know pain screams from fear screams from shock screams. You all got to take interrogation schoolfeedings.  
  
“You only started screaming near the end, though,” says someone else, behind you and to the side--you’d turn your head but you think your horns would blow, fucking hell. “...who’s ‘Kurloz’?”  
  
Your pusher tries to jump out your throat. “--nobody!” you say, and it’s too fast--you choke and cough on the word. “--n-nobody, what--?!”  
  
“Whoa, easy brother!” Hands push you back down, slap at your back to shake the coughs out of you. “Whoa there, lie the fuck back down and breathe it out. Uh. No diamonds.”  
  
You’re not listening. You said it out loud, just like when you were locked up and the edges of your thinkpan started running and melting in the heat and stink, when you couldn’t tell what you were thinking and what came spilling out of you between your curses and prayers and your fear, your never-ending fear. You’d called out for him then too, half a prayer, fucking weak like a wriggler crying for its lusus, and they’d made you suffer for it. And now you gone and fucked up.  
  
“Done,” says the brother stitching up your chest, and he pulls the last thread tight. “Won’t bleed all over the ship when you drag him up at the real mediculler, at least. Get him up there.” He gives you a look. “Don’t mess with it,” he says, and you’d get a bit salty over how he thinks you don’t know not to touch stitches and shit, except you do pick at them for the sting sometimes and that’s the downright truth of it. Besides, your pan is all full of noises.  
  
You think on those noises as they help you up towards the medicullers. Don’t like it at all, how that took you, shoved you in the dark room and shut you right the fuck down. Don’t like how you fell over and just screamed out for him like a grub wanting for its lusus. Don’t like at all how the fear still has hold of you, makes your knees shake when they help you walk and makes your face feel all hot and your pan feel tight like it’s blown up full of air.  
  
You’re scared. You hate being scared.

\--  
  
You’re not sitting with the medicullers more than half an hour before Kurloz shows up, walking fast and trying at pretendin’ like he’s not worried right to motherfucking death. He don’t even have to tell them to clear out--they look once at his face and then head for the door like they can’t get out of his way fast enough.  
  
“What happened?”  
  
It’s a longer question to answer than you’d think, and harder than it even would normally be when you just got pan-fucked. You do your best at it, though; the game, the psionic prisoner, and how she’d hidden her sign under someone else’s and sneaked up close enough to cut you and tear into you with her freak thinkpan. He sits, watches you, listens. Runs his fingers over your stitches, touching light down the length of the cut to check they’re good.  
  
And then you hit on having to tell him what she did to your pan, and you stop cold. You don’t like how the memory of finding you there takes him, any better than you enjoy the memory of being there yourself. The first sights of his face you got when he came for you, feel of big arms lifting you up and holding you close, how little he did want to let you go when the medicullers came and told him “... _we’ll take him from here._ “--those things are still all clear and shiny inside your head. His face was all blank behind his paints, but you recall the words,  _Gamzee, my little one you’re a motherfucking credit, little brother, you did good_ and his voice went breaking on your name and again at the word  _brother_  and there was something desperate afraid to his voice.  
  
It was a fucking painful thing, how tender he held you--motherfucking  _carried_. Curled you up in his arms as you cried like a fucking wriggler, as your blood painted his hands, as you lay too weak to open your eyes, and he carried you.  
  
You can’t think of no greater pity than that.  
  
That thought burns in you hot and sudden tight up in your squawk blister, and you know all sudden-like you can’t tell him out loud. Can't tell him where she sent you.  
  
He knows anyway. You can see the second it comes to mind; the dark thoughts cloud up his eyes as he remembers.  
  
”...pity they killed her first,” he says, almost like it’s no matter, like he doesn’t care, but there’s a tight sharp edge to him that you hear under every word. “...I’d have got a great joy out of making her fucking pay for that. Great joy indeed.” Then, softer, as he looks to you, “...get much paler and you’ll be a fuckin’ ghost, little one. You sleep off that pan-scrambling you had. I got places I got to be.”  
  
Fuck, so soon and sudden? You bite down on the words whining  _why do you have to go, just stay here_ , but you think he sees you thinkin’ it anyway because he looks back at the door, leans down and takes your hand up in his. He brings it to his lips--puts a kiss right on the back of your wrist like somethin’ out of stories.  
  
Then he spreads his big jaws right around your arm, sets his fangs into either side of your flesh, and bites like he’s tryin’ to take your fucking hand off.  
  
The pain is hot and sharp and makes your body jerk back from it even when all you want is to gasp for air and press harder for his fangs; he rolls your wristbones in his teeth and you see his jaw work around your petty flesh so strong and sure you know he could really tear you limb off of fucking limb if he wanted to. ( _Touch every piece of you, work his hands through you like clay and dig down deep into you for where your soul sits in the flimsy flesh you got for a body, hold it in his hands._ )  
  
“You’re spacin’ out from just that,” he says, and you blink and see he’s pulled his teeth from your flesh. He holds your wrist in his big, big hand and squeezes so the place he bit can’t bleed--the hurt is small and sweet and dear and makes little moans out of you when a breath gets away. “It really has been too fucking long, little one.”  
  
“Too long,” you agree, and he reaches over and gets the bandages from beside the bed where they were fixing you up. He drips that stinging disinfect shit on the tears in your wrist, watches your face as it burns and you squirm.  
  
“...Too long,” he says again, softer, like he’s talking to himself more than you, and then he shakes himself a bit and starts wrapped your wrist, tight and sure.  
  
You manage to sit for a whole motherfuckin’ minute while he bandages, and then you can’t take it anymore. “--can I come see you today?”  
  
He grins like he’s been waiting for it.  
  
“Maybe,” he says, and his nails trail at the inside of your elbow where he could tear out if he wanted. His claws bite at the softness there and makes you shiver and your pan still aches, but that’s less important than it was a second ago. “Can you get there without falling on your ass, is the thing for thinking.”  
  
He’s teasing at you, and you all stitched up and still sick. You frown at him, but he just grins at you and ties up your bandages good and tight. “I know,” he says. “You’ll get there. You’ll make it up there for me. What’s on your mind for today?”  
  
Fuck. You were all trying so hard to be pissed with him and now he’s being so good at you and all.  
  
“...what’ve you got, like...” you think about it a while, what you want, and it’s a miraculous thing to know that no matter what it is you want out of him he will have a way of hurting that gives it. He’s got you. He gets you. “...something you can...can take slow, but not as bleeds a whole ton.” Hate to get the medicullers pissed at you, even if you don’t go see them much--Kurloz is as good as, and he stitches you up most of the time. But you still don’t want to get on their shit list. Downright dispiriting.  
  
“Not too much blood,” he repeats, thinking it over. “You got stitches, right. So I can’t pick off the rack, that shit’s all about sharp and shock, and I’m not havin’ you bust yourself open and bleed all over everything.” You have to slump a bit, because you fucking love it when he picks off his rack of tools but he’s right, those make you thrash around all sharp and sudden and you got stitches. That ain’t a good way to go.  
  
You let him think about that, running through what he knows, and you see when his eyes narrow down a touch and his mouth twists at the corner.  
  
“...got an idea?” You ask, and he hums, thinking, low in his thorax, and smiles like pain.  
  
“...maybe.”  
  
So fucking excited.  _So_  fucking excited, goddamn. You sit forward, ready to hear, but he just shakes his head and laughs. “You’ll find out today,” he says, and leans down to you for a kiss. “Sleep.” And then, right in your ear, barely a whisper, “... _gotta fix you up before I fucking_ destroy _you._ “  
  
That noise you make just then has to be a whimper because it’s too weak and tiny-little to be a groan. He laughs, quiet and close, and pulls back. “--no touching,” he says, all stern, authority and order to you. “Straight to sleep now. You mark me?  _No touching._ “  
  
 _Fuck_ , that shit is downright cruel, and not in the fun way. You give him a saddest look, but he just looks on you all stern.  
  
"...No touching,” you repeat for him finally, and he nods. “Yessir.”  
  
“I’ll make it well worth your while,” he says, and it’s not even a promise, he just says it because he knows it’s true. Fuck, he makes that rule harder to follow every word,  _fuck_ \-- “Sleep.”

\--  
  
The sleep did him good, you think, and you listen to him scream. You turn the dial under your hands in reward for him bein’ so good and listen to his screams change tenor in response to you--after all, he followed your orders. His obedience is a credit, after all those sweeps with nobody to answer to, with not even a fucking  _lusus_  to teach him to do as he's told. But for you he listens, and  _look_  at him.   
  
The needles spark and hiss and crackle and then die away until they’re just metal again as you turn the dial down, no sparks of lightning dancing on them. The screams don’t die away until a handful of seconds later.   
  
He’s a sight—sat tight in one of your special chairs, strapped still enough he can’t break free for nothing but loose enough he’s got room to make those little jerking tries at struggling and can’t get away regardless. It’s motherfuckin’ beautiful.  _He’s_  motherfucking beautiful.  
  
You play the lightning over his skin for a few seconds, flick a different switch and the spark change wires, the needles sunk into his flesh high up inside his legs hum with power and he slams his head back on the chair and gasps through an open mouth. He’s dripping sweat down his chest, drooling, shaking, his eyes back in his head, his pain transforms his face with fierce ecstasy and his helpless struggling twists things inside of you. Can’t look away from this shit. Downright hypnotic.  
  
You cut the flow again, and he slumps down limp in the chair. There’s blood running in slow trickles from some of the needles—not enough to account for the smears of violet on the chair between his legs, though. When you step in front of him he whines and struggles some more, weak little twitches, _helpless_  little twists. You can’t even tell if his body’s struggling away from the pain on instinct or if he’s trying to get closer to you, sobbing for more.  
  
“…I don’t like doing this, you know,” you tell him, soft and sad. It’s what you do for an interrogation, as you would speak to a prisoner; that frightful mix of brutal pain and gentle voice that brings such terror to those you torture. “… _Hate to hurt my own church and blood._  But you do have such a pretty hurting face.”  
  
He snaps at your fingers, but there’s no force to it and you can’t tell if he’s still pretending to fight to earn your careful punishment or if he’s trying to complain at you for stopping. Maybe both. It’s a wet sound, when he moves—the needles that stitch his sheath shut, trap his bulge inside, pin his nook closed and empty and throbbing, gleam silver steel and purple slurry and he whimpers wanting and bucks his hips at the air.  
  
“…could charge these,” you say, a little delicate, and you touch the needles there, feel the tip of his bulge pressing at the steel that bars its way. That would make him come. That would tear him up to pieces. Just putting in the needles, the pain was enough to bring tears on him and had him coming with the burn of it.   
  
It’s been twice now. You want to see what happens to him with three.  
  
“ _Ahhh_ ,” he gasps, pleading—you know him and you know he wants it, wants to you to keep that word and do shit on his sweet self as would have anyone else passed out from pain of it. Even on most prisoners you use one set of needles, put in the back of their neck and that has them begging to confess to  _anything_ , whatever you wanted. You’ve done far worse with him here. You consider it, one hand on his skin and the other on your bulge, watching him squirm and cry and dragging out on the hot, sweet tightness building up and up inside of you.   
  
He’s still pulling at his arms, but the straps are too solid and he can’t stop you when you settle yourself down in front of him and trail your claws gentle over the arch of his twitching foot, over his leg and the soft inside of his knee. You watch his face every second and he digs his claws at the arms of his chair and makes pleading noises.  
  
“— _please_ ,” he gets out finally, and his voice all bent out of shape and sweet with needing. “Don’t just—fuckin’ tease—”  
  
“Mm,” you say, and press a little with your thumb at one of the needles in his leg—he takes a little gasp as it goes deeper into him, and you wipe away a trickle of royal blood from his skin. His stitches are oozing out a little blood too, but they’re staying and he’s so close. He’s close, you can tell by now by the way he looks and the sound of his voice. “Tell me how it hurts.”  
  
He takes a big breath and sobs it out again. “— _Kurloz—_ ”  
  
“Giving you an order, little one,” you say, mild as all fuck, and drag your claw down the rows of needles between his thighs,  _clink, clink, clink_. Every one makes him jerk against the straps, but you’ve got him here and that ain’t changing. “Describe to me.”  
  
“It.” He licks his lips. You turn a dial—the needles in his thighs spit for a split second and he strangles a howl and then slumps down panting when you turn it off again. “—i-it— _ah_ —motherfucking  _burns_ —feels—like I’m—tearing up, but when, when— _fuck_ —when I look—”  
  
“Sharp or dull?”  
  
“— _sharp_ —” the word is a whimper of pain and you can feel your pusher right up in your motherfucking throat, it’s beating so hard it’s like it wants to get away from you. You’re fucked up and he’s crying and you want to do more, push harder, bring more of those precious, sobbing wails out of him oh fuck you’re not lasting much longer watching him like this, time to finish this shit up.  
  
“ _Good_ ,” you tell him, and lean up over him to press your nugbone against his, close your eyes and breathe a little ways from him for a second or two. “… _that’s good, so good._ ” He clacks your horns together and takes shaking breaths against your lips, precious little shivering things. Your praise he craves, all the more now in his helplessness and his motherfucking need, and you steal kisses from the breaths he lets out and touch the tear-lines on his wet cheeks. “Talk to me.”  
  
“ _More_ ,” is all he says, and slips forward as much as he can in the straps to bump his head at your shoulder. “ _—nnnn—know—_ you need _—fuck, pity you so hard—_ ”  
  
Shit. Shit, emotions happening at you,  _shit_. You like to be precise when you hurt him, you like to have every bit of you under control, even as you touch yourself, even as you get off on it, you’re in control, but  _feelings_? That shit is way off. That shit is wild and soft and you can’t put rules to it. That shit makes your control bend and twist away on you.  
  
That he would pity you even while you hurt him. That he would struggle and scream and _pity you for hurting him_ all together and in the same breath. That he’s  _himself_ , these things are making it real hard to be the cold torturer here. Real motherfucking hard.   
  
“ _You need hurting to feel good,_ ” you whisper back at him, and nip at his ear. “ _Cry for me and ask for more, and you say at me that_ I’m  _pitiful, boy? All you ask me for is to destroy you. How can you fucking ask me that and then say pity at me?_ ”  
  
“ _You—_ ” you’re asking a lot of him, you know, to try at making him speak when he’s so far gone, but the question burns up in you all sudden-like. How is it, when you got him in your power entirely, that he can find it in him to pity you? What about you is there?   
  
He takes a long time to find the words. “… _you need it,_ ” he says finally, ragged little hoarse rasp, “… _need it, need to hurt someone, and f…and for—y-you need—someone you pity, you haven’t ever had…someone you can hurt and pity both together, you_ need _—_ ” he takes a gasp of air and now there’s a purple glint in his eyes like he’s going to cry. “…and you didn’t have  _nobody_ ,” he says, tiny and full of pain. “ _Not a single person and you needed someone, I know that hurt, brother, I know it so well—”_  
  
 _“Fucking hell,”_ you say, and you have to stop and step back and breathe a little. Fucking emotions. Emotions, fucking  _emotions_ , you can’t keep control over them like you can over the pain your hands work. You can’t set it in clear little numbers like the dial to shock him. Feelings burrow down in you and wrap tight at your pusher and you’re scared half to death. You can control planets easier. You can control  _empires._  
  
“ _Kurloz,_ ” he says, real soft, small and shaking and now does the boy tremble in earnest. Now does the child sob. “ _Kurloz, please—_ ”  
  
You take a mercy on him and you feel the sparks on his lips as you kiss him and turn the current on all the way and he says your name and gasps your name and  _screams_  your name—  
  
He goes still, just jolting through little shocks or leftover pleasure, and it’s the feel of those tiny gasps against your skin that does it, somehow, it’s his precious little surrendering gasps as he shivers. You sink your teeth into his shoulder to muffle your voice, and his cries blot out the stupid, tiny sounds you make when you come.   
  
You pick yourself back up before he does, of course—it’s a different thing for you as it is for him. He falls right the fuck apart, it takes him time to find all of himself and put together again. In the meantime, you let your legs find their strength again, rest your nugbone against his and breathe with him. You can unbuckle him without looking, and you do; touch the skin you uncover with each strap, as careful as worship, lifting his arms and kissing the places he’s pulled at the straps hard enough to wear at his skin. He’ll have bruises, you think, light little things, but there. His bruises are precious to you in a way scars can’t be—scars are sharp, piercing-hot to you, a throb of blood through your old worn-out body, but his bruises make you want to pick him up and hold him so tight he can’t breathe.   
  
By the time you’re bent down to undo his legs, moving slow, he’s starting to get himself together again. One of his hands comes down and you’re surprised at the feeling of it on your hair, pulling through it and claws over your scalp. Your horns are old and knotted and twisted with age, but it still thrills your backbone a little when he rubs the pads of his fingers there and drags his claws light over the skin, and you hum for him, appreciating. He falters, and then starts again, combing through your hair over and over as you undo straps and slide the needles out of his flesh. The ones between his legs make him squeak and whimper, but you put a hand on his hip and hold him still and you know he doesn’t have enough in him to go again—he’ll be sore now, and in the tired, stretched way. (Not bad, you think from what he’s told you; pain isn’t ever bad-feeling for him, not really. But too much and tiring and so good it’s almost painful all over again in a way entirely new.) You can’t comprehend, but you take him at his word. You’ve never liked pain.  
  
Goddamn but his hands feel nice on your hornbeds. You could get way the fuck used to this.  
  
You take a little longer than you need to to untie his legs, and don’t particularly want to straighten up again. But if you’re tired he’s gotta be half-dead with it, so you stand up, let his hands fall away from your bowed head and gather him up instead. (You hope he ain’t ever too big to carry, because you won’t feel right if you can’t wrap him up and lift him off to get cleaned up. Shit just wouldn’t be right.) He’s half-sleeping already, tired-eyed and moving slow, all wrapped up in that place he goes where he touches and kisses and squeezes in as close to you as he can get.   
  
He hasn’t popped a single stitch, you notice, and let yourself be a bit proud. Fuck yes. You may have a faulty pusher that does shit you can’t get a handle on, but when you hurt somebody you do  _exactly_  what the motherfuck you  _intend_  to do.   
  
“…can you walk back to your ‘coon?” you ask him, and he groans. You have to laugh. “…take that as a no.”  
  
“ _It’s not a wise one who leaves the place of their motherfucking heart untimely,_ ” he mumbles, and it takes you a second to recognize, but when you do you have to laugh again, longer and softer and proud of him. “ _No laughter in the suffering of those early lost of their quadrants so rest you with heart and spade and club and diamond and speak of the fucking Hilarity to each other._ ”  
  
“Chapter and verse,” you say, and he only pauses a second.   
  
“… _Hilarities 4_ ,” he mumbles into your arm. Another second. “… _verse 20._  Uh…” he yawns, big and wide, and whatever he was going to say, it gets lost. He slumps back down again. “… _wanna sleep w’ you_ ,” he says, and his eyes blink shut and don’t blink back open again.   
  
Well, you consider, as you walk back through silent halls to your room. Who could say no to that?


	12. Savor the Goddamn Moment

You don’t remember much past the second time you came and passed the fuck out last morning, but you wake up in Kurloz’s ‘coon with him so you have to kinda guess that you did good.

(remember your hands on his horns and the noises he cut off in your flesh as he came, and that’s all you need to remember, all you want)

(It’s a real shame he won’t let you hear his voice for real, but he don’t like to not feel like he’s in control. Scares him, you think.)

You found the clothes you had on when you came down to see him, eventually. They were all kinda thrown off to the sides from where he pulls them off you when he had you pinned up against the wall--you touch your shoulder and feel all the places he got his fangs down deep at your bones . You got so many bites on your shoulders they’re all silvery with scars. You poke at them as you wander up through the big set of rooms he’s got belonging to him, shove through the door to the quarters for the brothers and sisters in charge and close it shut behind you.

You only get about ten steps down the hallway before a voice speaks up behind you.

“There you are.”

You jump so hard you actually bite your own fucking tongue, go for your clubs and then realize you don’t have ‘em, they’re in the mediculler’s ward. They always take weapons off so when you’re hurting you can’t go berserk and pull on one of them. You were so excited getting out of there to come down and see Kurloz, you forgot to pick them up. You step back anyway and raise your hands empty to go for your claws.

Uderak comes out of the shadows and there’s a look like intent on his face that you find to scare you a bit, even as you drop your hands and stand up straight again. The urge all sudden-like to get your abscond on back to your matesprit’s ‘coon and hide from that look is real strong.

Uderak doesn’t say hi, doesn’t say goodnight, just walks up and stands in front of you with his arms knotted up in front of his chest.

“Who’s Kurloz?”

“What,” you say, because. You know for  _fucking sure_  he wasn’t there you  _know_ he wasn’t there and hearing somebody else say that name still makes all your entire body freeze up tight. This ain’t what you were thinking he’d do at all, you’re right off your fucking balance and all staggered around. “What the hell--”

“They said you called out a name,” he says. “...’Kurloz’. You just have to know the people to ask, brother, it’s a skill of the motherfucking inquisition.”

You never got great marks on inquisition, although you’ve improved yourself by asking yourself what you would want done to you if you were at your matesprit’s mercy and then doing that on your prisoners when you have tests. Much better returns are you seeing, too. But never so’s you could beat Uderak. You’ve gone and looked at his numbers a bit, since he set out to figure out who it is you’re flushed for, and  _goddamn._  He is to prying the truth out of trolls what you are to the word and teaching of the messiahs. Topmost of your hatching.

“There isn’t a ‘Kurloz’ on register,” he says, and steps up to you. You could push past him easy, but you don’t want to. This feels like it. This feels like it’s over. Sometimes there’s shit messiahs say you gotta accept as it comes from their hands and all, and this shit been coming for weeks and weeks. “He doesn’t exist. He’s nowhere in the empire.”

...no, forget that shit, you’re scared as hell. You don’t know what of--that things are gonna  _change_ , right now, now when you have all you want and everything so right and good. You don’t want to be seen and judged and known for who you love. What if they think you shouldn’t be doin’ this? What if they think you’re fucked up?

“Yeah,” you say, and push out a laugh--it sounds fake as shit. “Must’ve made it up or--”

But Uderak is shaking his head. “You didn’t make him up,” he says. “Not the way you called for him. Everybody’t saying so at me, brother, you knew him. You expected him to come. I would say maybe he died or some shit, but you don’t flinch like I’m saying a dead man’s name at you. You flinch like someone who’s got an inquisitor on his ass and he’s scared because the church is catching up on him.”

Holy shit. You don’t know why he didn’t come to talk to you face to face sooner, not when he looks at you like that and talks so much with motherfucking command. You think on being a prisoner, heretic again, helpless up against the wall in those unbreaking straps and seeing him come towards you like that, like he could pull secrets out your skin with his claws and drink them out of your tears, holy _shit_.

You kind of shiver all over a little bit. Your nook twitches and you hold onto a whine because  _god_  that still aches so good where he put in those needles and it is too early in the night for this.

“Besides,” says your brother. “Even if he’d died, which he didn’t, he would still be registered. Hundreds of sweeps since they started registering everyone who gets old enough to have a hive built for them, and if they’re feral what the fuck who cares, right?  You aren't fucking a feral.”

“Yeah, so.” Shit, they record that stuff? “...so like you said, he’s not--”

“But he  _is_ , though,” says your brother, and frowns at you. He has frowny paint on today, all serious-like. Maybe put it on planning on coming to ask you this shit? Serious business paint. “Stop tryin’ to tell me the motherfucker’s not real, Makara, and I’m gonna do you the favor and not act like I can trick it out of you again.”

“Huh?” you say, because you noticed one or two try to come up to you and get it out of you, but he never did shit.

Uderak stares at you, and then slaps both his hands over his face like Karkat does when he’s real tired of your dumbass bullshit.

“...you didn’t even notice,” he groans to himself. “I was being so all fucking careful not to let you know how much fucking  _poking around_ I was getting down on and you didn’t even contemplate.”

“Dumb as hell, me,” you say easily, “...smart sending the others to ask instead though, being as all I wouldn’t have guessed you were sending them if I hadn’t gotten a hint you were casting eye on my matesprit.”

Your brother frowns at you. “...but smart enough to be dumb,” he says sharply. “And smart enough not to give anybody I sent to talk at you anything to  _work_  with. Especially the ones that asked flat out, come on, I knew you’d notice those, those were a decoy.”

Oh. Well that’s cool, you can’t all be super sneaky ninja-ass motherfuckers like your bro here is. You didn’t even notice there were other questions happening--they must’ve been super secret like.

“Wow,” you say, because he did go and work so hard for getting to you and all. He frowns at you even harder.

“...but you’re right, brother, you don’t think on your own cunning,” he says, slow, looking over your face, reading you. “...you don’t play those games, you figure you haven’t got the panmatter for it. So here I am, not playin’ games anymore. Sometimes that’s the only way to find out.” He steps up further--he’s so little even now he’s grown some, you don’t think he’ll ever be bigger than a lowblood but he does scare the shit out of you sometimes.

“...Asking you straight to your face now,” he says. “... _how the hell are you fucking someone who’s off-register_?”

You could tell him.

You could tell him right now.

“He...” you start, and then chicken out again instead. “...he’s before the register started, is all.”

“...before the register?” He stares at you. “...you’re lyin’ at me.”

“On my fucking honor,” you say, and he give you a look through his one eye and goes  _hmmm._

_“..._ you fucking a fish?”

“Hell no.” She never did really fuck you after all, just held you and did unspeakable gentleness on you. And she hasn’t been at you since then--you figure maybe Kurloz warned her off.

“...gotta be one of us, then,” he says, and then nods, surer now, “...because he’s on the ship with us, isn’t he? Saw those bruises on your neck at the party where you passed out.”

You don’t speak as to the nature of the bruises that might have been on your neck just then--you don’t remember them being there, but you never really keep much track on what bruises are on you unless he took the time to put them there special, unless he bites down on your throat hard enough as drawing blood, you don’t really remember every different time. He likes to torture you like that, just sucking and biting down gentle not hard enough to sting.

“Before the register...” Uderak is saying to himself again, frowning. “Only a handful of us left that old, messiahs’ damnation, he’d...got to be almost as old as his Mirthful Majesty himself.”

The only reason you don’t flinch is that it takes you a couple seconds to even think of who it is he’s calling that. You’ve forgotten half the things the others call him since you stopped using them for him almost a sweep ago. You call him by name when you talk to him, and you call him “milord” when you talk to him in front of others. “Fucking powerful too if he’s still alive at that age.”

“Mm,” you say, and don’t look at him. He notices you hesitating--he looks at you closer.

“...I’m hitting close,” he says, and leans in at you. You can see the scar where his face got burned, little lines of dead skin peeking out under his patch. His eye watches both of yours. “What are you fucking  _hiding,_  brother. Who’d need to keep it a secret? Who’d be that old and take interest at  _you_ , when you barely been here five sweeps? Who...?”

And then he stops.

You see the moment where the thought touches his brain. You see him shake it off, and then see it take him again, and this time his mouth drops open as he considers, as he checks it against all he knows, as he  _thinks_  on the un-motherfucking-thinkable.

“...no fucking way,” he says. “...oh my god.” For the first time his face is stunned wide-eyed without a hint of slyness or cunning on it. He looks like you just shut his pan off and left his body standin’. “As old as his Mirthful Majesty.” And he stares at you like he wants you to say he’s wrong, like he’s begging that he be wrong. “ _Just._  As old,” he says, and that’s it. There it is. There it is.

He knows.

You look at him, and shrug.

“Oh my fucking messiahs,” says Uderak, and if you weren’t so serious at this second the way his voice goes all shaking would be the most hilarious shit. “Oh--oh  _fuck_ , no, come on, no.  You, you’re not--come on, that ain’t funny.”

“Ain’t meaning it to be motherfuckin’ funny,” you say, a bit sharp, because the fuck you’re lettin’ him slam on your jokes, that shit is fighting talk. “My jokes are fucking money, okay, this ain’t one.”

“Then--but--” he opens his mouth a few times, but no words come out. “You can’t be  _serious_ , brother.”

“ _Deadly_. Fucking serious.” Your fingers find the scar in the middle of your hand where he stabbed through you to bring you down when you couldn’t bear no more. Healed nice and even, but you can still feel the spot, the little silver circle of the scar. The marks from his fangs up and down your arms, little rings all over your skin like stars on a grey sky.

“But he’s...” he looks for words and doesn’t find them. Stops again, staring still at you. “...he’s...your  _ancestor_.”

“Yeah, so?”

Stops him again. You know what he means--shit’s downright straight-up bizarre. But you want to hear him say it, you want to hear him tell you some reason as  _why_  it should be like that, what makes this so strange. Why it even fucking matters.

“...it’s...just...” he tries, but then he can’t finish. He thinks, but can’t find a reason. “Holy motherfucking messiahs.”

“Yeah.”

“How--?”

You ain’t sure on that yourself. “Dunno,” you say, and glance back at the door you came out of. Uderak looks too, then back at you--his eye goes all round again.

“...he’s  _twice your fucking size_ ,” he says, a little bit in awe now, almost like a laugh. “How do you even--what--can he even--?”

“Hey,  _I_  told him to, he fucking  _won’t_ ,” you say, and then your pan catches up and your face goes all hot under your fresh paint. Uderak has his face in his hands and he’s shaking like he’s trying not to laugh at you and you’re so glad you’re  _so fucking glad,_  he laughs and he doesn’t look at you like you’re a freak and he don’t tell you  _blasphemy._ You owe a hundred hail messiahs for chapel, all the thanks in the world that you’re a joke and your quadrants holiest fucked up messianic japery. “Hey, come on. Shut up.”

“ _Nobody would ever fucking believe me,_ “ he says into his hands. “Oh my god you’re  _fucking_  the  _Grand Highblood_ , nobody will  _ever_  believe me.”

“...you gonna try to tell them?” You don’t know whether you hope so or not--whatever he hears in your voice, though, he looks up at you and sorta turns his head a bit to one side to think. His smile still hangs around, but it’s a little different now. You can see him look you over, get his motherfucking consider on.

“...not easily,” he says finally. “If that shit’s cool with you, I’ll let it be known to those as push me for it, though. Secrets, see, they  _burn_  to keep. Everybody wants to tell what secrets they got. Want to get it out of them--they don’t teach it to you in schoolfeeding, brother, but that shit’s important as fuck.”

“Yeah,” you say, and you’re all relief because of his kindness and all fear again because  _people will know_. They’re know, they’ll fucking  _know._ “...can’t ask at you to keep somethin’ like that, right, I got it.”

“No, brother,” he says, and he pats you on the shoulder, almost a pap. He has to reach up to you, and his hand doesn’t linger--you let it pass. “...I got secrets you won’t hear in a hundred sweeps. But that secret’s gettin’ its burn on in  _you._ “

You stare at him, not getting it. He sighs at you.

“You want people to know,” he says. “You want to tell people. See it in your eyes, brother, you want to write it on the walls and scream it to the whole fleet, I  _see_  it. Part of the reason I lost my cool and gave up bein’ subtle at you, because I saw your eyes and I thought  _he wants to tell_ ,  _this’ll be easy._  Should’ve taken me no more than a night or two, but you didn’t give out enough to even guess at his job, his class--not a thing. You’re a credit, damn.”

_You’re a credit, little one._

Fucking hell he’s right. You want to  _babble_  at him, tell him everything, telling Karkat’s not enough, having your brother here know isn’t enough, you want people to know he’s got you and how good he is for you and how fucking  _flushed_ you are for him, you just want to tell them all.

But he didn’t figure for your fear and for the gravity of it all and how Kurloz is in the church. Couldn’t even fit that thought into his pan, and you don’t blame him.

“Almost a sweep now,” you admit, and you’re glad for your paint when you feel your face go hot. “...think...think it’s right, bro. Think it’s meant to be. Written out by messiahs in the seas and stars and all.”

Uderak stares at you, and then, kind of slowly, he smiles.

“...yeah,” he says, and laughs again, a little softer this time. “...could see it.” He starts to turn to go, and then looks back at you and holds out a fist. “Whoop whoop,” he says, and you bump his knuckles. “Congratulations, brother.”

You don’t know what’s gonna come of this, watching him walk away and shake his head, but you’re just a little bit less scared.

\--

There’s another couple weeks of business as usual after that, and you know you’re gettin’ spoiled because you hate every day you don’t have Kurloz with you.  Even worse on top of all the other shit that’s happening, word of the psychic fuckery that happened to your pan and the stitches in your chest gets to them as gives out missions, and you are tied down shipside, no missions until you can be sure you won’t fuck up and bust your stitches when you’re tryin’ to assassinate some douchebag. 

You suspect Kurloz’s fronds in this business, but he won’t answer your messages about it, and just then there’s another fleet of lawbreakers taken down out of the sky and he gets busy as fuck.  You ain’t allowed to go take down the ships with the rest of your brothers and sisters, Kurloz is too busy for you, and you lie around your block and get twitchy and angry as fuck.  Read scripture and eat candied grubs and train until they tell you to stop and go fuckin’ recuperate.

The night your stitches finally come out, you’re up there looking for open missions inside five minutes.  They’ve mopped up most of the mess now, but there are still missions hunting down the ones that got out, and you turn in for that one, tell them you’re intending to take it.

The brother stuck pounding keys behind the husktop enters that into the network.  Looks up at you.  Frowns.

“…what?”

“It says here you’re prohibited, bro,” he says.

“Yeah I know, I just got the stitches out, I’m—”

“No I know that,” he says, and he turns the screen around.  “Look, I don’t make this shit up.  There’s a new one just in.  Says you’re not allowed to leave today.  Have to wait till next night.”

You could fucking scream.

“Sorry, motherfucker,” says the brother behind the computer, whatever he sees your face do at the bad news.  “Comes from way higher than me.  Just one more night, I’ll see you back up here then.”

You try to text Karkat on the way back to your block, you’re so  _fucking frustrated_ —but all you get back is a short  _NOT RIGHT NOW, GAMZEE_.  Not even a diamond to warm you up inside.  When you send a message to Kurloz, a little more hesitating but still hopeful (hopeful maybe he’ll step in for you and let you off the ship right this second) you get nothing back at all. 

Seems like a good time to cuddle up in your pile like the sulking wriggler you are, and pretend you aren’t mad your matesprit hasn’t had time to talk to you in nights while you’re shipbound, or all hurting up on the insides that your moirail totally just blew you right the fuck off.  On top of it all, your bones are all aching inside you.

You’re settling down in your oldest, holed-up clothes, miserable as fuck and ready to look for some skanky shit off shooshtube to watch while you’re thinking about Karkat, when somebody knocks on your door.

For a second or two you contemplate not getting up at all and just making like you’re asleep already.  But then whoever’s out there pounds on the door again and it’s clear like hell that they got no intention up in their pan of letting you lie even if you  _are_  in coon.  You drag yourself out of the pile, open the door and try to smile, for all the shit you feel like.

It’s a sister you don’t know, except maybe you seen her paint one or two times when you were getting’ your walk on around the ship.  Her hair all tied up high on the back of her head and her horns look real thin and sharp like she could put eyes out with them.  Probably a sweep older than you, full adult by the dark of her skin.  “Makara?”  She asks at you, and you nod.

“…morning, sister.”

“Morning,” she says, and you do shake-slap-fistbump smooth as smooth.  She smiles a little wider at you and you like her a good deal.  Then she stands up a bit straighter and pulls her smile away again.  “…Terris Greher.  I have a message for you from the Grand Highblood.”

_That_  gets you up and listening good and hard.  Message?  He never sends a ‘message’, and he don’t usually get you this early at daytime, either—back on the homeworld in bright season, the sun would just barely be going down.  Usually he just waits until most are gone to ‘coon, and then he comes for you himself.  Never sending “a message”. 

“What…kinda message?”

“He wants you to come to his throne room,” she says.  “…and he says not to disturb the two of you for a good couple of hours once you’re there.”  She grimaces at you all apologizing and confused.  “…sorry brother.  I think you’re in deep shit.  Said something about, uh…like, he was gonna get on some real stern reproach about...” She pauses for a sec, you can’t breathe, she thinks over it.  “…said something about ‘a whole sweep’ and he was gonna deal with you real good, ‘finally’?”

Oh god.  Oh god. 

“…yeah,” you say, and get up.  Oh god, you gotta get cleaned up, you gotta—you—oh god, okay.  What’s he got for you, what’s going to happen?  What’s he going to do?  He’s never sent for you special like this, so formal.  Oh messiahs you don’t know what’s going on, but you want it happening,  _now._   “Yeah, okay, yeah, I’ll—just get—cleaned up so I’m not.  I’ll just.  Fuck, okay, uh…”

“…if you die, can I have your husktop?”  says Greher, and you just go “Yeah yeah sure fucking fine!” and start tearing off your shitty old clothes like it’s a mission.  “You don’t have to hurry so much, I’m pretty sure whatever he’s got to hash out at you he’s not going to go easier just ‘cause you’re earlier—”

“Which one of these looks good?”  You ask her, urgent as death, and you don’t have time to wait for her to answer—they’re almost the same clothes anyway, you grab the one that’s newer from washing and cleaner and pull it on.  “Okay I gotta go, bye!”

“—whoa, Makara—”

“Thanks for tellin’ me, sis!”

You run most of the length of the ship and then slow down when you start to get up to the door of his throne room.  The doors are shut like always, and you been hanging around in your room bein’ mad about the mission you couldn’t take until pretty late in the night.  Down on the homeworld, the moons would be setting, everybody would be settling into the ‘coon for the day.  The thought of being in there alone with him makes you shiver all the more.

You pull the door open (gets easier and easier), step through into the color-lit dark of his throne room, and—and stop. 

Kurloz is there, but he’s not the only one.  There’s others around the throne too, taller and broader than you, long-horned and scarred.  Their paint is harsh and silver and brutal, the paint of a full subjugglator, sweeps out of training.  You shrink a little and look up at the throne. Kurloz is dressed up in full, and he looks up as you come in and doesn’t quite smile.  There’s somethin’ on his mind and you don’t know what.  You slow down, not sure, but you done it so many times before your legs do it for you; come forward and kneel and stand.  The others look down at you. 

“…heard you needed to talk at me, milord,” you say, all respect, not flushed in slightest.  You took longer than any other fucker in the class to figure at keeping your head down and spitting wickedest words of reverence  at a motherfucker, but you got it after a while.  You’d wanted to show willing for the Grand Highblood when he came around, you remember it so clear even through the fog that lives around your pan all the time.  “Sorry to keep you so long.”

“Gamzee Makara,” says Kurloz, and you look up, but he’s not talkin’ at you.  Looks like he’s all telling at the others who you are.  “…twelve sweeps, first degree subjugglator.”

You open your mouth to say yeah, but then just don’t.  Nod instead.  Now he looks down at you, but there's still no consideration in his eyes.  Like he don't even know you.  

“What was your score in scripture?”

You wouldn’t remember in any other class, but you know the shit out of that answer.  “Best in the hatch,” you say, quick and sure.  “Motherfucker didn’t know what hit it sir.”

“Colors chapter one.”

Takes you a second, but no more than that.  The only things you’ve ever remembered sure and clear, that doesn’t sink off through the holes in your pan and get away from you. Scripture stays with you. Scripture, you have and can hold.

“ _You’re next,_ ” you recite off the top of your head.  “ _You’re motherfucking next, give no mercy because the mercy of the messiahs is only as much as fits in their hands and what’s poured out on shitblooded scum will not be given you in the dark carnival gates and—_ “

“That’ll do,” says Kurloz, and you shut up again.  “The Vast Honk.”

“ _—will deafen and take from us, and all together we’ll head on up and get our dance on through fire and over skulls and horns—_ ”

“Good.”  Kurloz holds up a hand.  You shut up.  He looks up at the others again.  “Convinced yet?”

They look at each other, back and forth, then at you.  “…convinced to consider, your holy hilarity,” someone says, and Kurloz twists up his mouth like  _well that’ll do._  

“…sorry,” you say, and everybody turns around and looks at you again.  You’re glad of your paint for the sake of the blushing that you all happen to be doing under their eyes.  “Uh…what am I doin’ here…?”

“You got the scriptures all holed up in that pan of yours,” Kurloz says, and there’s a grin under his voice, so faint you wouldn’t hear it if you didn’t want to hear it so bad.  “…what I want to know, wriggler, is if you figure you could get your schoolfeed on of them.” 

You gape at him for a full few seconds before you can even try to answer, and then Kurloz holds up a hand before you can open your mouth.  “…not yet.  Not till after pupation, can’t just toss a brother in there with brats a sweep younger.  But you figure you got it in you?”

You look around again, and this time you know where you know the faces from.  Faces as taught you  _never let your feet stop moving, never block unless the tips of your horns are at least to their chin, dodge those blows, these are the words of prayer, these are the long-dead martyrs._   Schoolfeeders.

“…I,” you say, because what the fuck, you came here to get good and fucked up until you couldn’t so much as make a word and this shit is not fucking fair.  “Uh.  I…I figure I could, yeah.  She said I could, uh.  Sister Tressor, I mean.”

People look at each other and at you and you’re glad you didn’t just show up in your shitty sleeping stuff.  You try not to look too much a fuck-up.  Kurloz watches you, and maybe he sees how freaked out you are because he cracks his fearsome-ass face to give you a little smile while nobody’s looking.

“Nothing settled,” he says, and everyone stops mumbling and looks back at him.  “Putting forward that shit for proposal is all.  Give it thought, brothers and sisters.  And now…” he sits forward in his seat.  “…I have some business to deal with you  _personally_ , Makara.”  He frowns cold as a dead star.  Everyone goes still and shrinks a little.  “I’ll talk to you, and you  _alone._ ”

You haven’t ever seen a group of full-grown motherfuckin’ adults scurry for the door that fast. You’d laugh if you weren’t all of a sudden so shaky inside all over again.

You wait a couple seconds when they’re gone, kind of fidget foot to foot . He’s got his chin in one hand, tapping his thumb against his lip, like he doesn’t even remember that you’re there. You keep your mouth shut and let him think, until all of a sudden you can’t stand it anymore.

“...so...” you say, and have to swallow when he looks at you, cold and blank and the paint is all of a sudden a mask between you and him. “...s-so--?”

He stands up, and whether it’s the dark of the room or your nervous guts or the way he holds himself, he seems tall and terrible again, like he did the first time you came to him and confessed your hungers and your needs to him.

“...we won’t talk here,” he says, and he walks away.

You stand there and stare after him for a good few seconds as he walks before you realize he wants you to follow him. You run up and most days you would step in beside him, grab his hand maybe--but you come behind him instead, hold your head low and shiver.

He walks you a familiar path--into the private blocks for the church leaders, up to his own door and inside. It’s dark in there; he doesn’t turn on the light. He turns around, and he looks down at you again, and for a second you can’t tell what the expression is that twists up his face. You don’t ask. He’ll tell you, you don’t have to ask,  _he’ll tell you_  and why are you so tense, what’s going on, there’s  _something_  that’s going down here and now.

“It’s been a solar sweep yet since this started, you and I,” he says, weird and formal, and you nod because yeah, you figured maybe. “...and I got a thought on what I figure I want happening today--” You try to listen, but you don’t really much--you thought you were gettin’ led off for somethin’ real exciting, some pain as you ain’t yet felt maybe, but this is just his block where you been a hundred times. And you fucking love a lot of the shit as happens in this block but that don’t mean you ain’t a bit...just...kinda...

“... _I want to fuck you_.”

It takes you like a punch in the guts.

For a minute you can’t find the air to answer. Can’t make the words fit down into your pan, not in the slightest, can’t believe what’s being said at you. For serious though, for  _real_? For totally real and true,  _finally_ , after you asked him all those times, he’s letting you--he wants--?

He’s lookin’ at you, and you see the twitch of his fingers, the way he wets his lips and chews his tongue and waits for your answer like your answer could ever be nothing but  _yes yes fuck yes do it do me do me hard._

_“..._ if,” you say, and have to swallow real hard to clear the lump of crazy, terrified not-believing joy out of your squawk-blister. “--if I can walk for all the whole night after you’re done with me--brother I swear to all fucking gods and messiahs I’m gonna be  _so_  motherfucking disappointed at you.”

You see him tense up, and then his eyes go wide and bit by bit he smiles.

“ _If you walk for a_ week _after I’m done with you,_ “ he says, so low and soft and strong it shakes at your bones, it rattles you to the tips of your horns. “...I’m  _gonna be so motherfucking disappointed at_ myself.” And then he stops talking and just kisses you all slow and deep and hungry, the kind that sends you spinning around inside and makes you press into him and search for more with every last tiniest bit of you. Just the thinking of it’s got you so jumped-up you can’t hardly hold on yourself, and he laughs at your greed and eagerness and holds you so you can’t rut up on him like you want to.

“Slow down, little brother,” he says at you, and runs his big hands up and down your back. He doesn’t lift you up, but he pushes you stumbling backwards until you press hard against the wall and he pins you there, tight as the ropes and chains and leather straps he’s put to you before, tying you down with him, with the  _smell_  of him and the press of his chest as he breathes in and out. “ _Slow down._ “

“But--” you try to move--his hands come to your hips and hold you still, tight and strong so you can’t. You whine for him and he laughs. “-- _come on_ , motherfucker--fucking around with me right  _now_  you asshole--”

“Just want to make this last,” he says, all innocent, and he slides his hands down, starts peeling away your shirt an inch at a time. You go for your pants and he lets out one of those little  _quit your squirming_  growls. You could fucking die you’re so jittery at waiting, but he just laughs and throws it over one shoulder to keep--slides his hands down your thorax so you twitch and peels your pants off you the same, a little at a time.

When he rips off a strip of  _your_  shirt (your _best fucking shirt_ , what an asshole goddammit) and starts in slowly scrubbing off paint, you’re just about ready to bite him you’re so fucking tensed up. “Come  _on_ ,” you push him, and he grins and keeps wiping at your face. “Why the  _fuck_ \-- _mmph._ “ He presses the cloth over your mouth to shut you up. When he pulls it away you open your mouth to keep bitching at him, but he crams the cloth right in your mouth and closes your jaw up tight again. It tastes like paint and wax, makes your jaw ache and your tongue dry. You make complaining growls.

“Taking my time here,” he says, and presses a finger over your lips. “...doin’ this right and motherfuckin’ careful. When you get to be my age, wriggler, you’ll get your schoolfeed on on how to  _savor the goddamn moment_.  Now shut up.”

You want to yell at him about how you don’t  _want_  to savor the goddamn moment, you want him to  _ruin_  you--but around the wound-up cloth he shoved in your mouth it just comes out  _mmngphhhmmmghpghhhhphhph_  noises and he tears another strip off your shirt and goes back to wiping you up with it.

“...need better light,” he says, "Come on." And how the fuck he expects you to go  _anywhere_  when you’re already way past ready for him to just  _do it_ already is a fucking mystery to you, but he reaches out and grabs one of your horns and pulls and you have to follow.

He leads you through and to a room you never gone in before on the other wall from his ablutions block, and as soon as you walk in you know why he didn’t ever bring you here. Real, honest-to-gods pailing platform, the room’s dark and quiet and he’s got nothing there but the spot he’s going to fuck you until you break and a box sitting next to it, black and plain and familiar. You’ve seen some of the insides of that box before--hooks and needles and blades and clubs.

You’re terrified right out of your fucking mind. You want this more than anything in the world.

He sits down first, but when you come over he doesn’t lie down with you--just hooks a hand up behind the lowest curve of your back, settles you up in his lap and gets good hold on your ass.

...and goes back to  _cleaning your fucking face_ , you are going to  _hit_  him and you don’t fucking care anymore god god  _god_ \--he lets you grind yourself down on his thigh, but no more than that. He lets you whine and groan through the gag, but no more than that. When you start to reach up and take it out of your mouth, he grabs both of your wrists hard and gives one of those real and true  _snarls_ , great and deep and long and big as planets.

“ _Don’t you fucking dare_ ,” he tells you, sweet-dangerous, and digs his claws at your palms. “... _you don’t wanna know what I would do to you, little one._ “

You do want to motherfucking know, and you want him to  _do_  whatever it is he’s threatening and more than all that you want him to stop pokin’ at the tiniest motherfuckin’ smears of your paint and touch the rest of you already because your bulge is already out and has been since basically he started kissing you and your nook is a reminder that pounds with your bloodpusher and don’t stop and don’t ease. “ _Mmmgnghhngh_ ,” you say at him, real sarcastic, and he chuckles and drags his claws all over your skin.

“... _could crush you_ ,” he says, quiet, thinking, and his hands tighten on your thorax, sudden and harsh enough you croak out a gasp. It aches in your ribs--your body tells you, some deep-down animal feeling, that if he wants to keep squeezing, sure as steel and machines, his hands will break you. There can be no give, no mercy, to strength like that. It breaks what it likes and you  _want_  it. “ _...just a little squeeze. Break you, just like that._ “ He digs his claws at your stomach and you arch back, open yourself up for him, press into it until you can feel him drawing blood holy shit you’re so close already everything feels so bright and good--his voice is soft as starlight, his eyes burn your skin like the sun. “... _you’d like that, wouldn’t you? I could make my claws meet through you and every precious brittle piece of you would_ snap _like it wasn’t ever even motherfucking there and you’d love every second_.”

His hand comes up--traces your lip, takes a handful of your hair and tugs your head back for him to get his mouth at your throat.

“...this is going to  _hurt_ ,” he says against your skin, and it’s so gentle and so absolutely sure that it sends shakes all the way through you. You’re already right on the edge, jumped up on anticipation and the smell of him in the air, you’re right there and wavering, just--

He bites down hard at your throat and he  _tears_  into you, claws your back so hard and deep you scream to the break of your voice and you’re coming, motherfucking brutal and rattling down to your bones. Takes you to pieces until you’re all trembling and seize and shake on the insides, panting out gasps against his chest. He holds onto you and pulls his hand away with you still wanting more and leaves you pressed to him, all trembling and raw-needy and shivering at how everything seems too much all of a sudden. Your fangs tore at the cloth between your teeth--he tugs it out now you’re not makin’ too much noise anymore--just little sounds, sounds you don’t seem to got control on, little cries out and whimpers.

“See?” He lets go of your hands and you reach down fast as you’ve ever moved and get your hands on yourself, drag out those shudders and that gasping tightness in your insides as long as you can. “...can’t savor a moment. Fucking wriggler.”

He moves under you for a time and a half while you work yourself out--you don’t know what he moves for or why, you’re wrung out and still shaking and you don’t want to open your eyes yet. For a bit there he sort of pulls you off to one side to lie there and purr, and he goes for a while. Comes back and picks you up again with wet hands. Minutes, and the burn in your back keeps you shakin and limp for all that time, feeling it and not thinking.

It’s only then as he holds you and drags his claws up and down your back, gentle this time, you realize this ain’t right--not what he promised you. You pry yourself up and open up your blurry eyes to give him a look.

“...what the fuck?” You ask him, and he looks down on you and raises an eyebrow (like you ain’t ever been able to do). “Thought you said you’d--”

And then he reaches under you and everything about you stings and burns up and catches fire when he grinds up his big palm hard into your nook. You’re still shivering with what just took you--the pain is near and sudden and big and  _sharp_ , sharp enough you buck up against him and make a noise all keening-ragged at his touch. Now you know what he’s been doin’, why he was moving around while you lay around all wrung out from that first one. He’s taken his shirt off while you were far away, he’s pulled his hair out of the way and his face is cleaned. He watches you and doesn’t take his hand away and you slump down and let him grind it in circles nice and slow. Your back burns at time with your pusher and the move of his hand.

“... _just getting you warmed up, little one,_ “ he says, soft and sweet and cruel as love itself, and you realize what he’s sayin’, what that’s all meaning, and you chirp at the need that sends at you. There’s scars on his chest like streaks of white paint, every which and other way, crossing over, older faded ones and new bright ones, he’s all thin muscles, just like you, and his eyes in his bare face seem all that much keener. You touch his scars one at a time, lean on him and run your fingers over the lines where he’s been wounded before you were ever hatched. When you put your mouth on the ones in your reach he makes pleased noises at you. “...gotta get you  _relaxed_. Good and ready.” He slips his fingers up and down your nook and it’s smooth and slick and makes you shake all over and you ain’t sure you’ll survive this.

Even more sure you don’t give a single flying fuck.

“ _Do it_ ,” you gasp at him, and he hums and keeps his hand at your nook, thinking.  His other hand slips down between you—but not touching you.  Not touching you, touching  _him_ , you can hear soft little wet noises—he's ready but he won't touch you, won't  _fuck_  you even though you want it  _so fucking bad_  and you know he does too. You make a terrible noise and thrash around and he snorts and pins you still again.  “—motherfuckin’ do it,  _do it, do it_ —”

“Patience,” he councils at you, and you give him a growl as loud and long as you got breath for. 

“I did  _patience_!”   You remind him, and he looks surprised and then laughs at you.  “Been patient to fucking hell and back, I did patience, come on—!”

And then you just about swallow your tongue, because oh hell does he take you at your word.  His hand is gone sudden and sharp from your shivery skin, pulls away from your nook and something else takes its place.  You’re used to the stretch, how good it feels, but you still ain’t ever ready for the strangeness of it, and even the littlest bit of where it starts to fill you up makes your whole self turn and twist up tight.  You could fucking throw up you’re so nervous right this second, but you close your mouth and just shiver because if you throw up you think he’d probably quit and you couldn’t fucking  _bear_  that now.  ( _What if you fuck up what if he doesn’t like it what if—_ )

And then just as the stretch starts to really take you, just as you start to shiver and lose your breath— he stops.

“If I really am all tearing at you inside,” he says, and he’s serious as scripture, as the dark chapters read only by the damned for sacrifice.  You bite down at a whine, and try to nod instead, all serious.  “If I’m hurting you in some way actually won’t be fixed, you  _tell me_.”  And then he must get a look on at the saddened frown of your face, because he grins at you and steals another kiss.  “... _I_ like _your nook_ ,” he tells you, so close at your lips you can feel his breath, and even while he talks at you he slips some more in you enough to make you catch at your breath.  “… _I want to get a lot more use out of it.  Don’t like to break my favorite toys._ ”

Something hard and hot and needing slices through you hard and quick and you shudder all over and whine for him—he laughs and bites your neck hard enough you feel a streak of blood down your skin. Pulls away with a cool breath that makes all the torn skin burn and stab at you like the echo of his fangs all over again.  Again, more blood, and again, until your whole neck’s hot and stinging and you’re babbling into his shoulder, bits of words as don’t mean a motherfuckin’ thing,  _yes, messiahs, please yes, fuck,_ Kurloz—

“ _Relax_ ,” he snarls at you, and licks a long strip of your blood, right up from shoulder to jaw, comes back to kiss your mouth as you gasp.  “ _Ease up, little one, you’re all tightened down.  Tight enough as it is, fucking_ relax.”

Sure, easy to say.  You try, but every time you think about it you go tight with excited shivering, with how good it feels, with how much  _more_  it’s going to force you.  He notices; he solves that by stopping every time you start to tighten down on him and kissing you and rubbing hard against your horns until you’re  still and whimpering and limp for him to keep going.  He’s barely started for having to stop and soothe at you—you cling onto him, and you feel the stretch grow slowly more.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he growls in your ear, and his hips jerk up and you let out a cry you didn’t know you had in you, all raw and rough at the shock of it.  You didn’t realize how slow he was going, how hard the control over himself, and it’s suddenly more than just good, it’s  _great_ , it’s a hot white stretch inside of you.  “Fuck _that’s good—_ “  The shock and strain that hit you when he moved is fading, the pain is going too—words fail, won’t come, but you press down towards him and you think he understands how you try to fuck yourself harder on him, how much you just want  _more_. 

“ _Okay_ ,” he says, and it’s hoarse and pleased and he sounds like he can’t quite catch a breath—his claws twitch and dig hard at your hips.  “…you asked for it.”

This time he does it on purpose, rolls up under you hard and fast and mean and everything inside you turns right that instant to purest dizzy need.  You’re thrown up and out of yourself like a strike of lightning, you’re wrapped up in the burning arms of gods and  _still_  he presses into you.  It’s too much, too fast, but not enough and too slow and you are breaking to pieces inside and it is the most motherfucking  _glorious_  of glories, and he’s got your bulge in one of his hands and he toys with it as you gasp and shake and shudder limp up against him. 

You might be coming, you figure all dizzy, longer and slower and sweeter than you ever have before, but you can’t tell and it’s like fucking  _drowning._  You’re going somewhere and you’re not sure you can come back, don’t ever  _want_  to come back, just feel him hollow you out inside for the rest of your life.  The  _burn_  goes right up to your horns and you cling at him and make the tiniest of noises because you can’t draw air to scream praise and because you want to hear him; you gotta be as tight for him as he is big for you and his breath is a harsh rasp of a thing in your ear.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he breathes, and he  _groans_  into your shoulder as you shake around him, this long low snarl that lets you feel the flats of his teeth pressed against your skin.   _“_ Fuck,  _Gamzee, little one, oh love,_ messiahs fucking take me—“  He rolls up under you and fits into you another length of him and you both makes noises in need and in staggering wonder.  His hand is tight as motherfucking bruises on your hip, you’re sobbing and whimpering and making this endless string of noises over top of it all, ragged and constant and needing. You think you’re bleeding a little, and the hot sting when he moves makes your oculars roll back in their pits, everything black and flashing white behind them.  Your body ain’t nothing,  _nothing_  but the places he’s holding on to you and his bulge taking you, wrecking you, pulling you apart at the seams.

And then he stops, and his legs all shaking between yours, and you lean your head into his shoulder and sway and look down at the join of the two of you.  His claws have been biting and bleeding you and your blood is running all the most beautiful colors from your side.  You’re sunk down on him to the fucking root, all of him there is to take and you feel broken with pain in the best way a break could ever be, you feel torn to beautiful shreds all up inside you and the look on his face when you raise up your head, it’s—It’s just a—

It’s a fucking miracle, is what it is.

He shifts himself a bit up and that jolts you both—both of you all tense and shudder and breaths coming harsh.  There’s purple on his legs and yours and if one of you came you got no way of knowing.  Could be blood, some of it.  Everything is far off of you and hazy and his voice sounds like it’s from the other end of a long, big-ass tunnel. 

He’s sayin’ your name.  He ain’t even movin’ inside you, holdin’ himself still and you ain’t in full consciousness to appreciate right this second but some bit of you hangs on that and you are so motherfucking loved here, here where he holds on to you and the pain tears the walls away from your pan.  You chirr at him how you love him for being so careful with you—it comes out all kinds of bent up and strangling off.  His big hands take you by the shoulders, squeeze at you a little.

“Gamzee _,”_  he’s saying, and it’s all tight now, his voice, sounds like he needs you to answer but you’re up so high and you don’t want to come down.   _“Gamzee_.  Fucking hell,  _talk to me_ little brother— _”_

“ _…hhnhhh_ ,” you say, all wobbly and far off, but that doesn’t seem to set him back in his chill—he runs his fingers over your face and you guess at tears and sweat and your hair all hangin’ in your eyes, you’re a fucking mess.  You want him to move.  He promised he’d wreck you to the night of the dark carnival and back and instead you’re starting to drift down, out again from that hot foggy place above you in glory.  His shaking you, his voice sounding so sharp, it’s bringing you back down, and you don’t want to be down. 

“Gamzee!”

“… _nnh_.”

He stares at your face, and you blink and shiver and stare back.  Takes every littlest most tiny bit of you, but you pull it all to one place and find as where your mouth fucked off to.

“…mmm— _mmmore,_ ” you ask him.  “ _Good—_ more!”

He takes a deep breath and it hisses back out all relieved, his shaking calms a little. 

“Don’t fucking scare me like that,” he grumbles, and his claws run all up and down your skin, past your horns and down your neck, over your sticky, gross-as-fuck face.  You bit your lip right through; the sting and the blood make you shiver and you’re reminded hard of the  _full_  of him, how fucking  _big_  he is inside you—fuck, you can’t even tighten up on him, you got nothing but just shaking, being filled, letting him have you.  You feel like you’re gonna die.  You feel like this is be best death as has any saint or fucking martyr in holy writ.  You feel like you’re going to burst apart if he moves and you feel like you want him to move more than you want any other single fucking thing that has ever been.  Your blood is a throb between your legs and all up and down you, up your back like little jolts of lightning hitting your pan.  The pain is pain you haven’t ever felt before so keen, right up into your guts and it’s fucking  _glory._

“ _More,_ ” you tell him again, and it cracks up on the end because he moves just the slightest tiny bit inside you, all the stretch made new again.  “—fuck oh god— _more more more—_ ”

He laughs a little, a strange laugh, a laugh you don’t know, but you ain’t fully down from your high still and you can’t take to bits the subtlest of his sounds and his feelings.  Old man’s a deeper ocean than you can fucking dive.  He leans down over you and his tongue makes lines all sweet and cool and fucking gorgeous up the length of your neck where he bit, makes the blood flow new and sting, drags a whimper out of you and you’re headed to the tents of the high and holy  _right the fuck now_ if he doesn’t touch your goddamn bulge again—

“Greedy little wriggler,” he says up against your throat, and drags fingertips slow and cold from neck to thorax to hips.  “…give me cause to all think like I’ve fucking  _broken_ you and then that’s all as what you have to say for yourself?  Not even asking nicely, you little shit.”  He moves, oh  _god_  he moves up against right down in the core of you, long and cool and so slow.  Now you’ve got your breath again, now you can give voice at that pull and twist in you.  Pain boils up your throat and you’re screaming, every inch burned right up and charring away and stripping you bright and sharp and raw. “… _let’s hear you then._ ”

“ _Hurts—!_ ” is the only word you get out, because it  _does_ , it burns, aches deeper in you than you could ever reach yourself, deep like something tearing you open right down to the fucking  _core_  of you.  Not sharp like blades or needles or skin splitting, not dull like a fist it’s just, it—it’s— “— _good_ , god  _yes_  yesyesyes—I—c-can’t I, I, I—you’re fucking— _killing_  me I need it harder come on  _hurt_ me _—_ ”

_That_  makes him groan back at you, sink his claws in your sides and grind up against you and for the first time you see his head snap back, his breath shudder.  You’re going off in your pan again, like you did when he first started opening you up for real, but this time it’s different because you fight at it, push it away for now.  You want to see his face, see his eyes go half-shut and his breathing go deep and slow when you rock on him, hear him say your name again and again like you’re a wonder to him, hear his voice  _break_  and shake like you haven’t ever heard before.  You want to do this ever y day for the rest of your life until he kills you with it, you want to ride his bulge and touch his nook and see what noises he’ll make and you want him to throw you down and take you hard and fast and brutal, no warming you up and no mercy. 

You want to lean down and kiss him, and when you do, he jumps like he forgot and then kisses you deep and slow and leaving no time for you to breathe, dragging at your hair, digging his claws at your skin and you’d been so focused on him fucking you you forgot there was more even he could do to wreck you.  For god knows how long, you don’t think of anything at all.

You claw your way back to the place in your pan to think in words—minutes later?  Fuck, hours later?—and your pan reels when you try to remember how to talk—too much, there’s so much happening, being  _done_  to you and your pan can’t keep up. 

“ _Wait,_ ” you get out, and it’s a sign of how far away he’s gone that he takes a second to hear you, to slow and take his claws out of your skin.  He takes a couple deep breaths, and then clears his throat and asks you “… _you okay_?” like he wasn’t just fucking you and playing with your bulge and taking his claws to every place most painful, all at the same time.  “—wait, w-wait  _ahhhh_  no don’t fucking  _stop,_  just, just I  _fuck—_ ”

He watches you, waiting until you’re just ready to finally say words again and then moving slow and writhing and  _fucking amazing_ deep down inside of you and sending you spinning off again.  Fourth time he does it you growl at him, and he laughs and flicks a claw against your bulge right at the meets up with your nook.  He seems satisfied for then with the way you shriek out in shock and flinch—and more than satisfied by how that makes you bear down on his bulge, fucking huge, constant pain inside you.  When you tighten it makes him catch at his breath, his hands curl on your skin so his claws dig into you.

“ _What,_ ” you ask, and breathe.  “—wh-what—‘s feel like…?”

He raises up his eyebrows at you, and you feel something down deep in you clench up tight at the way the light meets the lines of his face—he hisses and drops his head back for a second to breathe in and out.

“… _what do you_ feel _like,_ ” he says, really quiet, and puts a hand on your stomach, presses so you cry out loud at how much  _bigger_ it makes him feel to have his hand pressing on your gut.    “How does this  _feel_ , huh?”

“— _please—_ “ you get out to say, but you don’t know what you’re asking for and he laughs and takes his hand away, goes back to clawing and pressing and twisting at you, breaking you up into tiny little fucked-up crying pieces.  Your face is covered in tears now, you can feel them drip off your chin and your thoughts keep drifting away, getting lost in all the  _good_  coming at you from all around. 

“… _smooth as fuck,_ ” he says, finally, all far off like he’s describin’ a dream he had once, and when his fingers come down and touch your bulge you’re so startled you let out this thin little wail and struggle like you can get away from him—like you would ever fucking  _want_  to get away. “… _all around me, it’s_ so easy  _making you move for me, little one,_   _I feel you_ shake  _inside for me  when I just…”_  and he squeezes and makes you cry out again, again, again, till you’re sobbing and barely listening to his voice go on and on.  “ _—face when you cry, all twisted up and helpless,_ helpless _, so fucking helpless to stop me—_ ” and he twists down a little and slides his fingers further down, touches the opening of your nook where you’re stretched around him and you didn’t know you  _could_ make the noise you make then.  “ _—can feel you bleeding,_ ” he says, and it’s almost like he’s worshiping you, how tender he touches and how he watches your face then as you scream.    You’ve been losing seconds, your eyes won’t quite see straight and everything is a blur and fog but you’re coming towards  _something,_ a pit, a light,  _something—_

“… _Kh…_ ” you get out, and it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done but it’s worth it,  _so fucking worth it_  for the way he opens his eyes and stares at you, all of you shaking and bleeding and stretched out in his lap. “ _K…’loz…_ ”

“Oh,  _but you’ll be the motherfucking death of me, love,_ ” he says, choking, and he curls himself down so he can kiss you, rolls up against you and digs his teeth at your skin between kisses, breathing faster now, harder now.  His hands pull you down hard against him and something that was just a constant good feeling in the back of your pan  _jolts_  all of a sudden, all your insides jump and twist and you wanted to keep your eyes on him but you’re going away and it hurts so good and you can’t  _focus_  and oh  _oh—_

By all rights he should scream, he should say your name, some shit like that but he just makes this beautiful, breathless noise, almost a gasp,  grabs you and holds you so tight against him you can’t breathe, makes  shaking sounds into your hair  and whatever spot that hits in your pan it’s enough.

You just fucking  _fall._

_\--_

You know the moment Gamzee leaves his pan behind, because it’s the moment when his body stops fighting at you. Wriggler tried so hard to relax for you, you know he did, but he couldn’t relax in full with all you were doing to him.  It’s good he goes slack, too, because he’s still tight as  _fuck_  but at least now he’s not clamping down on you and shivering around you and rocking on your bulge  and you can actually ease out of him and bring him forward, up on his knees and looking somewhere far away. 

Once you get him upright, you just stop for a while, sit there and breathe.  Goddamn.  Ride and a half from start to finish.  And while you wait, you lean your head on one side and, now he can’t blush at it or look away, you look your descendant over.

He’s a mess; sweat and blood and slurry all over him, tears streaked on his face, hair in his eyes.  He bit through his lip. Your clawmarks all over him, and trickles of purple down his thighs.  There’s no sign how much slurry he got in him, for all it has to be more than it rightly should be—he’s not made yet to take an adult’s share of a bucketload in himself.  If he was awake now he’d be squirmy and so full it ached, you’d bet.  Better to get that out of him, then, before he hurts even more in the afternoon than he already will.

_“There you go, love,_ ” you tell him, and pull him up close to you over the pail—by all rights you should have his material in you like he has yours, but it’s most of it on your legs and his, now.  Ain’t a problem.  There’ll be more.   “Right there, now give me one last scream.”

If he was anywhere near his own pan he could do it himself, but he’s off in his own head and he isn’t even thinking right now.  He stays where you put him, all asway and wavering, shivers up and down his skin when the air touches his hollowed-out nook and the mess of his skin all stained with blood and slurry.

You slip two fingers up where your bulge was, press on the tautness right down deep inside him, and draw your fingers down slow and steady until they’re all the way away again.  You haven’t ever figured why that works, but it does—maybe his body thinks it’s a bulge drawing out of him—and he throws his head back and  _wails._ The noises he makes as he spasms and shakes himself empty are nothing like words, but they’re fucking beautiful and so’s the look on his face, that unconscious, wild ecstasy of doing  _just_  what messiahs designed you for, what your body tells at you is right and true and natural. 

When he’s done you cradle him up in your arms—like you aren’t shaky as hell and still breathing like you ran a mile, god, you’re too old for all this—slip a finger down in his nook and move nice and slow, coax him out through shocks and shudders and little cries of pleasure and sweet agony.  There’s some blood, but not so much as you feared, and you aren’t just satisfied with what’s been, you feel hollowed out and content like you haven’t for hundreds of sweeps. 

It’s only when he groans a little and nuzzles his face at your chest you realize you’re purring, too.  Not just the half-sound you can make on purpose to let him know how good he is, but a real deep true purr from right down in the pit of you.  In fear, or anger, or desperation, trolls are animals—but you’re feeling it right now too, the want to curl up around him and run your hands through his hair like a grooming goddamn animal, to make noises instead of words. 

“ _You did a good job,_ ” you get out, and you couldn’t stop purring for the world, you’re so—so  _fucking happy_ , messiahs, you haven’t been so happy since as long as you can remember. The words aren’t hardly words at all, all distorted by this croon you’ve never heard in your voice before.  “ _Good, good good, there you go Gamzee,_ shhhh  _look what you fucking did you little miracle, goddamn—_ ”

You lift out the pail and move it away, and he shifts enough to whimper and squeeze his legs together a little—you pull your hand away from his nook and he sighs and slumps relief.  You don’t even think he hears you when you talk to him, really.  He’s far off, he’s far,  _far_  away, like he was when you first started to fill him up for real and you thought he wouldn’t come back.  He’s covered in his own blood and slurry and sweat and tears and you think you’ve never seen him more beautiful.  

…except for he’d be even prettier if he was smiling at you, but you don’t think you want to wake him up just to have him smile at you. That would be an unkindness, even if you thought he would be able to understand what you wanted from him right now. He’s limp and still and when you touch one of his thighs they press together unconsciously and he lets out the tiniest gasp of a whimper. 

His body is only just starting to come back together from the cruelty done to it in making it take you; only just now does his bulge slide finally back away, and what you see of the slit of his nook is a dark, bruised violet, tender and torn. (You won’t be doing that again soon, not without tearing those open and risking scarring him up inside.  That’s the very last thing you want.)  You reach down and trail the very tip of a claw over that delicate flesh, and he catches his breath in a trembling little gasping sob that makes every worn-out bit of you twitch and tense up and hurt like fuck and is totally worth it.

Your legs still don’t like the idea of standing up and your hands don’t feel right not touching his skin, but you need to get up and clean him off, you're the adult in this motherfucking relationship and you growl at yourself and get up on your shaky-ass legs.  When you pick him up he groans a little, and you have to half-laugh as you carry him off to get cleaned up.

He stays out of it as you wash him up; doesn’t make a sound beyond those little moans, eyes open but far off, doing what you help him do but no more than that.  When you have to clean from his belly to his knees he whines and shakes, but he doesn’t fight your touch.  You pet his hair, not pale but gentle as his moirail could ever hope to be, croon at him  _you did good you did a good job my little one my love_ and let him be still with you there in the water for a while, as he lies still and breathing slow and you think on a sweep ago tonight when he came to your throne and offered up pain to you like a sacrament. 

He doesn’t wake up, but when you start murmuring prayers of thanks, you see his lips moving along with you to the words and you could fucking cry—or scream, or  _kill_  him, you love him so much.

\--

Gamzee doesn’t come back to you for hours.  You only know he’s awake, in the end, because you feel him shift around next to you, feel him tense up and then hear his whine of pain as he feels what’s been done to his nook come back and hit him all over again.  His hands grasp for something to hold on to and don’t find anything but slime, his toes curl against your legs and you laugh under your breath and wrap an arm around his thorax, press a hand down low just above the sheathe of his bulge to make him gasp.

“Welcome back,” you tell him, and he tenses up just a second and then whines again and brings a hand down all slow and careful to where your fingers are touching. 

“Fucking… _hell,_ ” he says, tiny and hoarse.  “ _…got…what I asked for._ ”

_(Break me, hurt me,_ ruin me—)

“You know me,” you say, and kiss the back of his head.  “...spoil you rotten, wriggler.”

“ _Mm,_ ” he says, and touches, real careful, between his legs.  You feel him flinch and hiss as he works his way across his skin, feeling it out, shivering a little.  When he reaches his nook he gasps again and shudders so hard he almost takes a big breath of sopor.  You shove yourself up a little against the wall of the ‘coon, grab him and pull him up with you.  He groans—claw-lines all over his back and his sides, his hips and his shoulders, aching and hurting. 

“…what’d happen if I got my fingers up your nook right now?” you ask, real casual, and he groans.

“…think I’d pass the fuck out again,” he says hoarsely, and shudders when you press on his belly again, aching where you filled him with slurry.  “Fuck, brother…no, come on.”  You press one last time, and he whimpers at you; you laugh and take your hand away again.

“Be glad,” you murmur in his ear, and nip the tip of it to make him jump.  “…the church is motherfucking merciful.”

He huffs out a laugh—and then groans again, a tone entirely different, when his acid sack rumbles long and loud. 

“Fuck,” he says, and rolls over and pushes himself up.  He puts a hand on his thorax; it rumbles again.  “Aw  _fuck_  I’m hungry.”

“When’d you eat last?”

He frowns.  “…couple hours before you had me come over,” he says, confused.  “Ate a fuckload of food, too, I was so full but fucking hell I feel like I could eat you.”  He chews at your shoulder a little like he’s really thinking about it—you pull him away by one horn and play-growl at him and he snorts and then groans again as all the bits of him complain.

Then you think about it, and the thoughts combine into a single simple fact.

Oh. 

“…achy bones?”  You ask, careful, and he looks surprised and then thinking and then nods.  “Really sleepy all the time, I expect.”

“I…” he looks at you sidelong.  “…yeah, like that.  What, you been sick like this before?”

“…no,” you say, and look off into far away and long ago, when the empire was a thousandth of the size, when your skin was almost unscarred and your paint was clean and new.  “…no, not for a long, long fucking time.”

“…okay?”

He sounds confused.  You shake yourself off, look down at him.  He cuddles up back to you, wincing all over.

“You’re gonna get lucky,” you tell him.  “Won’t be sore for more than nights.  Mighty motherfucking disappointed with myself.”

“What?”  And he does sound disappointed, like you’re making him sad at that.  “Aw fuck, why?”

“Because,” you tell him, and you wrap an arm all around his soft little thorax, while you can.  “…I think you’re coming up on pupation.”


	13. Rows and Silence

In the end, it doesn't take more than a week before your wrigglers start cocooning. Gamzee's one of the first. For the first night you can see him; his eyes shut, his face nothing but peaceful. As the slime hardens and clouds, his face vanishes. And then they come and bring more and more of them, line them up in your throne room, the center of the ship, the safest place. Rows of grey cocoons under the painted eyes. Rows and silence.

You wish you could say you know which one is him, but they're all the same, and all you can do is sit in your throne room and...wait.

Those are the longest weeks you remember in your whole life. There's always a few wrigglers pupating at any perigee, somewhere in the fleet, but after a drone season the Mother lays out thousands and thousands and they die or grow and the ones who grow all pupate together. The ship is always silent those times, all hands back to the ships, guarding the new purplebloods--because if they're taken now, or crushed as they are, what little you'll salvage of them probably won't last a sweep. The only time your throne room is guarded.

The smallest are the first to come out, those who make it. It's hard, for those who start small and don't grow much, to crack their way out and climb on their new legs. You see faces worth remark, and are glad to see them grown and dark and their fangs and horns grown long and sharp. Little quiet Rishet, crawling and gasping as she grows fully reacquanted with her earthly corpse all new, others whose names you count out one by one as they come out, _Kerroh, Antiss, Luiren,_  Garrow whose kismesis died in Gamzee's first mission, Uderak so small still he passed out before he more than half made it out of his cocoon, staring at it all with two grown eyes. He'll never be as good with the one he lost, but the rebuilding, for the ones as survive, fixes most and soothes what it doesn't fix.

Others aren't so lucky.

You don't use your clubs, not for your brothers and sisters that crawl out half-formed and undone; their bodies are warped and their bones are soft and they breathe through crushed and shrunken lungs or not at all. You pull a knife, the oldest weapon you've held, the one handed down to you from the hands of the troll you killed to rule. This is what it's been used for for longer than any troll remembers, for this and only this, and you hold onto it tight and pray and kill.

You have to cull maybe a handful in the first week of hatching. Some faces you had known to show real promise. You meditate on how Messiahs must have thought same as you, and let them have what's due them, and pray like the selfish trash you are that the next rattling corpse you make won't be him, _it can't be him._

And as the ones who are hatching come out, bigger and stronger, far bigger than he was, you fear.

You wouldn't call what you do "giving up", not truly. Some traitor part of your pan won't stop telling at you _he could still hatch out, he could still be growing in there, he could still--_ but you disbelieve it hard and cold in the pit of your thorax and you know that hoping is stupid and you spend your time when you aren't sleeping or having new-hatched brothers and sisters carried off for caring-after ( _or culling_ ) trying to convince yourself on that. No point hoping. Give him up and it'll hurt less. No point hoping.

You pray, and it hurts but you find solace in that. You watch.

And then, when there's just a handful of cocoons left in front of your throne, late in the day, in the quiet and the still, you hear something break.

It's right at your feet, right in front of you, a crackling and crumbling and something moving under the cocoon. You pull your knife to be ready and sit and watch and wait, tired as all hell and aching in your pan right up to your horntips. You counted out earlier in the night which of those who cocooned were yet not accounted for, and you wonder who's fighting out of there, worry distant about Gunhar's needle-thin horns and how they'd last trying to butt up against his cocoon.

It's not horns that come through first though--it's a hand, punching up and through, and then another through the hole the first made. Looks solid yet, and you lower your knife and sit back to watch. ( _doesn't matter it won't be him doesn't matter--_ )

And then all in one big tearing _crack_  a body pushes up through and into the air, wild hair and a flash of bright long horns and the knife drops out of your hand and clatters off against the floor.

You know those horns. You see them every time you do your paint.

( _It can't be after all this time, it can't be him, he's been gone for so long he can't be_ )

( _you prayed for a miracle and you were_  given a miracle _and it has to be him, it has to be, you don't fucking know what you'll do with yourself if this is taken away from you now--)_

The place between despairing and fury and hope catches you, holds you frozen where you half-stood when you saw his horns; you watch, breath caught, praying, looking for infirmity as hegasps in air and claws up and out, gets his arms free and slumps, pants and gags slime as his aeration sponges clear.

And then Gamzee blinks around at the other cocoons around him, all kind of groggy and sleep-blurred still, and goes "... _motherfucker._ " and drops his head down onto his arms and _laughs_.

There's something about that laugh that gets down to the heart of you and shakes you loose of whatever had a hold of you and you come down from your throne in two steps and drop down onto your knee next to him. His skin's still fresh and he's not to be touched yet--but he looks up at you and smiles the most beautiful smile and you want to, oh _god_  you want to.

"... _heyyyy,_ " he slurs, and pulls himself a little further out of the slime towards you. His back is bare and smooth and perfect, but you miss the scars you put on it, just a little. They were yours. And they were on him, and now they're not. (You'll just have to make some more.) " _How you--'lways know--wake up--_ " you lose half the words when he yawns, long and slow, and trails off into words all soft and far-off as stars. You almost reach for his face again and he sees, takes notice, turns his face to you to touch.

When you get in hand your traitor pan and pull away, he looks so sad as he might cry, and it's not a thing you can motherfucking bear, not for a second.

"All that new skin won't want touching yet, little one," you tell him as gentle as you can, and you feel for a single moment, some small, stupid part of you, that the other cocoons can hear you, that even though you don't care who knows, you _don't fucking hold a single care in your pusher_  about who knows how flushed you are at him...you feel like the walls got callous ears and you talk lower and smaller, just to him. "... _you're still too easily broke for these hands._ "

"D'n care," he says, stubborn and wrigglerish-simple still, and rolls his head to one side to look at you and not lift his head. His neck is dark and smooth and thin and you want to bite it and all the waiting and the fear and the tense of your long-held peace are boiled in you to a needy ache. "--nnnnnh _hhkurl'z come_  on--"

Gets real hard, when you want it and he wants it and he's lying there bare and helpless and made new again by Messiahs remaking, it gets _real fucking hard_  to tell yourself not to just lift him out of the slime and have your way at him.

...but you're in the middle of your throne room, surrounded by your brothers and sisters still yet to hatch, that slime ain't something to get in your mouth and for all you know hurting him like this would _ruin_  him it might...well. Fuck, it might ruin him, for real. His body's still getting to settle in its new shape, it's soft, and forcing it at all might set that way and not ever be fixed.

"... _be the first motherfucking thing I feel,_ " he says, so quiet you barely hear him, but the words are a fist in your guts, a knife in your air sacs, you find air hard to come by for a second. It's stupid, _you're_  stupid, butwhen you start to reach out toward him he makes a pleased little noise and squirms up further toward you, and you can't--you're--not strong enough. Not for this.

When your hand touches his face he makes the most beautiful little sound and shudders all up and down the length of him, a slick slide of new flesh and the crackle of crumbling cocoon.

You pull your hand away again because it's that or do stuff you ought to not, and he moans and slumps down to breathe long and slow.

"...don't--" you start, and get a shock at yourself because your voice sounds strangled-off and choked. You clear it out and try again and it's more like your own. "...don't want to break skin while you're still setting, wriggler, you know that shit scars like no fucking joke."

You hold up your hand, and for all the sweeps, all the countless ancient dust-choked sweeps since you pupated, there's still the scar on the palm of one hand, where young Kurloz crawled from the slime, slipped, landed on the throne room floor and gashed his hand. You don't get a good recollection on what drew your blood or how bad the pain must have been because it took at you like a club to the thinkpan. You'd passed right the fuck out of it. It's there still, clear-edged and un-faded on your skin, purple-white on dark, and Gamzee looks at it with eyes wide and mouth awe-slack.

"... _want one."_

That. That is not the answer you'd looked for.

"You-- _what_  now?"

"Y'r symbol," he says, and it's the clearest thing he's said since he came out of the cocoon. "Mmm--my--our motherfuckin' symbol. R'here." he puts a hand on his arm, the muscle of his shoulder.

Oh.

Oh _fuck_  yes. And the pain? You get what you want, what you've been aching for since the second your worry burned off into wanting of him, you'll get to hurt him when he's more vulnerable just by being than he's ever been for you in his life and he gets his scar and your touch and the pain and somewhere to rest off his pupation.

"Abso-fucking-lutely," you say, and he grins. "Not here."

He glances around and sees the other cocoons, the doors cracked open--he nods dizzily and pulls himself forward the rest of the way, sliding and crawling and pulling himself free. You catch him as gentle as you can before he can hit the ground and lift him and you can do it but not quite as easy as it was before. You couldn't carry him forever, but it's no great trial of your strength to carry him the length of the ship and back, and your rooms all considerable closer.

He's silent while you walk, and you don't speak any more than him, just hold and walk and think on the body you've got in your hands.

You have seen wrigglers grow more at second pupation, but not often. The top of his head has caught up with where the points of his horns used to be, his shoulders at least a half again as broad and the entirety of him longer and stronger and adult-dark. His flesh is a perfect lack of mark or scar, his claws are too long and his hair is in curls and knots down to his shoulders. He still twitches and gasps when your hands squeeze or your claws prick him, but he doesn't seem unhappy at it--it's like it's just a surprise, every time. Like he's forgotten what it feels like.

You're going to give him the _best_  fucking reminder.

When you get him to your block you lay him down on one of your work tables; the cold makes him jump and whine but he doesn't have it in him to fight and his face is feverish purple under the new dark of his skin. You run your rough, old fingers over his cheek and he bares his throat to tilt his head back and sigh.

"You sure about this, wriggler?" He nods 'yes' good and hard and sure at you. "I'm strapping you down."

" _Nnm..."_ he looks so tired, but even as his eyes slide open and shut all slow his hips twitch, his tongue flicks over his lips all wet and dark. "... _I c'n hold still..._ "

"No you can't."

He makes a complainy noise--you reach out, put a claw to his chest, push it just enough to go through skin and he goes "Ah-- _ah_ \--!" and jerks around like a lowblood on a hook. You pull your claw away and grin at him and he rouses enough to look embarrassed.

"... _'kay_ ," he mumbles. "Just--do it before 's too hard to."

You could tell him the exo ain't gonna harden up all in the time you got him here--he'll be softer-skinned for a day maybe, and it'll be longer even before the real thick strong skin takes hold, before he gets the hide'll turn claws away at glancing blows and shrug off blades less than killing-sharp. He'll be a true highblood then, but now, with him all gentle purple horns to shoulders and squirming on your table to get cut at, it's funny to even think.

"Hold your hoofbeasts, I'm getting there," you say, and because you can, because it's a joy to you and it give you every chance to look over every new inch of him, you don't stop at his shoulder. When your fingers brush his hips he twitches--when you tighten the straps on his thighs he groans, long and low and ready, eager. He's lost some weight and gained back muscle, a build closer to yours than the skeleton he came to you with; you can still see the sharp arc of his hip under the skin and the dip under the bottom of his thoracic cage, the tight ripple of new-formed muscles stretching and straining for the first time.

When you start to go for his other arm finally he gets it loose of your hands just long enough to bring it up and smack you in the nose.

" _Faster,_ " he demands, cross and needy, and you laugh and laugh.

"You can't give me orders," you tell him, and draw your claws up the arm you're going to cut, tense your hand so it threatens to dig at his flesh with your claws. His eyes go wide and then snap shut and he pulls at the straps--not to get away, he knows he can't and he wouldn't want to. But he does like to struggle, your boy. "You look pretty tied up, wriggler. I'm doing this for satisfaction of my own self and you can't fucking stop me, so hush up."

He grumbles all impatient, but _you're pretty tied up_  makes his ears flick and his cheeks darken again, and he shuts up.

You ain't cruel (well you are, fully aware of your cruelty and you fucking _love it_ but) and you don't make him wait long after you got him laid out and tied down. Clean the spot off real good and scratch with a claw tip so light it leaves the faintest purple line in the shape you mean to cut. Even that makes his eyes fall almost shut, his mouth go slack and fill up with sighs.

"Ready," you tell him, and you find his hand with yours and feel his fingers close tight and trembling on your own.

The knife goes in in straight, smooth lines, true as scripture verse and heraldry, and he screams with all his lovely white fangs, screams himself silent and breathless, screams one unceasing wail until you swoop through the last loop and the mark is done. Seconds, a minute maybe, no more. You went, maybe, slower than you needed to, maybe deeper than you needed to by a hair, and blood drips down his arm as he shakes, all lovely and bright and fresh on his dark skin.

He lies there still then, keeps his eyes shut as they leak down purple across his cheeks and breaths all in shudders and shakes and tries to find his way back to himself again. You watch him, press the cold flat of the blade to the cut skin and he whimpers, pathetic and pitiable and needy and helpless.

You give him as long as you dare, but he's tired and that pain sears hard and deep straight to the animal core of you, un-fucking-bearable--he's far off an you need to bring him back. Now ain't the time for him to be wandering.

"Gamzee," you say, and lay your hand heavy at his throat, press just enough to make his breath catch and halt a second. "--open up love, look at me now."

He takes a second to remember how to open his eyes, but he does in the end. Looks up at you with eyes still wet and wide and dark and grins all wobbly and breathes " _holy fuck_ " and you have to laugh and lean down over him to kiss him. He gasps against your lips and you feel him shiver, responsive in every way, every little move setting new trembling to bear in him.

When you pull back to look him over his bulge is out and bare and lovely, his nook is slick and for all he can't move with the straps on him he struggles to spread his legs for you anyway. He ruts his hips up with this eager little whine when he catches you looking and you want to _fuck_ him, like you did before he left you for so long, you want that tight smooth ache that goes through to your bones with the rightness of it, and the way he gasps fragments of things that sear at you like coals, _tearing me apart_ and _harder hurt me fuck me_ hurt _me_ \--

" _...no,_ " you say, really gentle, and he makes the longest, loveliest motherfucking sound, all shaking and sweet in his heaving chest. You drag the tips of your claws down his belly so soft you don't even leave lines, but the feeling drives him to pointless struggles and wild sounds. "Even this, brother, this is too much to give you. Tell me true that it doesn't hurt you."

He makes a snapping cry, angry and mightily fucking disappointed, and you're glad you tied him down suddenly, glad he can't come to try to beg what he wants from you. You don't trust your own self if he could do that. "-- _hurts!_ " he snarls, and you can almost make out the words choked off in him, _why the fuck do you think I want more?!_

"I hurt you enough with this and this you'll motherfucking have," you tell him, and you know your touching is half the reason for his still-sensitive skin, that nobody is dumb enough to get fucked up on pheromones this soon after pupation and he shouldn't still be quite this sensitive still. You're dragging it out and you love every fucking second.

You tap a finger at the cuts you put in his skin, dripping down purple blood on your table, and he snaps his head back sharp and quick at the pain. He's far-gone and lovely and it won't take much to finish this but you hesitate to be done and end it, holding on, keeping him here on the edge for just a bit longer. Just a little longer. "You'll have this the rest of your life. _I'll be there._ "

And on some stupid fleeting thought you lean down and kiss the bloody skin, and he gets the words out _"--please yes_ fuck--" in a cracked cry and shudders up against the straps. You can't touch his bulge still--but when you get your hands against the inside of his slick thighs and put eight tiny, bleeding lines down them, four fingers for each, he shudders like it's almost as good.

You let him lie for a little bit after that. First of all is gel on the cuts to make the blood stop, and when you have him bandaged up with your softest bandages you take to just sitting next to him and moving your hand on his face and hair so slow and gentle he doesn't hardly seem to notice when he starts drifting off and heading towards sleep right there strapped on the table.

When you touch his arm to wake him up he jumps, but it's nothing like the sharp, gasping shock of before and you're glad and bereft in equal measure.

"... _'coon, little one,_ " you tell him, and he yawns and nods and lolls his head back to close his eyes while you undo the straps and tip him up gently into your arms. Not so little anymore, is he now? His horns have grown almost another full turn, still not so heavy and lofty as yours but stronger and darker than they used to be. His face is his, it's his and you love it, but the softness of his cheeks has faded as they darkened, and there's a sharp cut to his jaw and a touch of noble arch to his pointed nose that you think he did not get from you.

And then he turns his head into you and smiles in his sleep and there he is again, for all the subtle strangeness of his face there's his sweet mouth that murmurs scripture so smooth and well-learned, there's his eyes shut and trusting and if you squeeze him close and make an old sound at that, if you let out one of those animal croons from the back of your pan ( _love and need and ownership and the being owned and fear and pain and_ love) there's nobody there but you and him, and you know he'd never tell a soul.

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara, you've been made new again and shit _shit shit FUCK--_

you land flat on your face tripping over your own goddamn fronds for the hundredth time tonight, slam a horn into the wall and curl up in a ball on the ground to swear until it stops hurting.  The pain feels good, sure, just fucking fine, but it ain't like somebody is doing it to you and it's not sharp and sweet and it just kind of aches at you.  

Your head with your new horns is heavy when you try to get up again; your new arms and legs unsure and your shoulders a little bit too wide for your estimate of yourself.  The others your age stumble around the same as you all make a mockery of combat schoolfeeding--all of you confused and wandering, but you grew more than them and here you are tripping over yourself like a newborn bleatbeast and slamming into things like you been blighted with blindness in both ganderbulbs.

Somebody pokes you with an elbow.  You look around and then look down; your little most secret-seekingest of brothers grins up at you, both his eyes bright and sharp on you.  He's even smaller next to you than he ever was, small enough you could pick him up with one arm probably and not feel it too much.  ( _Oh god how small is Karkat gonna be next time you see him, he'll be so small and warm and yell at you for bein' so big you'd bet, ahhh fuck and you didn't tell him about Kurloz fucking you for real yet, he'll..._ not _want to hear about that but you're gonna tell him anyway because fuuuuuuck that felt so good, the best, you got so distracted--_ )

"How the actual fuck," Uderak says, really quiet, "--did you get that?"

He's pointing at your arm, where the bandages are good and tight over the big slices Kurloz put through your new skin. Your new-hatched brothers and sisters are bruised and beat where they been falling and stumbling for the past night or two, but none of them bandaged like that, all the way up their shoulders.

You look down at your brother and then back at your arm and then back at him again and he seems to get what you're saying from the look on your face because he snickers and mumbles _"...grand goddamn highblood_ " like it's a joke you told him once.  Takes him a couple seconds to laugh that out, and then he looks back up at you and he's all seriousness again.  

"...told my moirail the truth," he says, and your insides jolt at your thorax like your bits are all jumpin' around in you.  Makes noises of you, a little gasp of "--huh?"  He looks a little ashamed, and you see him shift around and not look up to you.  "... _she asked_ ," he says, a little whisper.  "Don't think she believed me, but, well, she's got the thought in her pan now, right?  So.  So.  Uhh..." him all so sharp when he's hunting down secrets, and it's a real funny thing to you to see how when he's called to talk in other ways he loses his step, he talks in stops and starts.  

"...so, you...you tell anybody yet?"  he gets out, and looks back as a schoolfeeder walks within feet of you.  Raises his hands to fight.  You put away your clubs and do the same--better to not get anybody listening in.  Everybody leaves clear space when a brother gets his Messiah-ordained holy throw-down on.  

"Not yet."  You've got arms like the fucking hell, they're longer than you're used to yet but somehow he gets inside your reach on his surer feet and his fist slaps out and hits you right on the chin.  He dances back, all little fists and sharp eyes.  " _Uhff--_ fuck you."

He freezes up so fast you almost land a hit on him--stumble on your own feet again but at least this time you keep your head to messiahs and your feet on the floor and that's better than you been doin' all tonight.  

"--you said I could tell--"

Oh.  What?  Oh, no, shit.

"No, fuck you for gettin' your fist all close and personal with my nug, motherfucker," you say, and he blinks and frowns and then gets what you mean and goes loose again.  Brother worries what you think of him.  From him who scares the fuck out of you a little bit, that shit's sweet as sopor.  (Oh wait you ain't supposed to say that one anymore bein' as how you got in so much trouble all those sweeps ago about that, uh--)

"You figure she'll tell?"  you remember how your fronds are supposed to move, if you can just get them to work now; a step and a dodge and then you spin the other way, so close to them you're almost pressed up against, and while they go for where you ain't anymore you crack the back of their pan open.  That was a fast step or two though, you ain't sure you've got it in you this second.  "When she gets it, like, y'know, when she knows."

He goes for you--you take a swipe at him and he has to spin back and away and almost loses his feet.  Goddamn maybe these new long arms you got are a blessing to you after all.  Shouldn't have doubted it.  

"Len's smart as fuck," he says, a little bit distant, and you see his eyes flick over you and up and down, looking for spots you're weak.  You pull yourself in close and tight and ready and watch him.  ( _When you're lucky enough to be much bigger than your opponent, much stronger--any spot can be a weak spot,_  says schoolfeeder Bereti in your pan, _just choose where you're going to use that, brothers and sisters, they believe the church to be wild but we are cunning in wildness_ \--) You blink and you're in the air, your body doing what your thinkpan was too stupid and slow to tell it to as Uderak goes in low and fast to grab at your skinny, clumsy new legs.  You can jump fucking _high_  now, gods.  

And then you mess up the landing, try to roll it off, judge your horns wrong and slam your face into the ground. _Again._

"--she knows better than to just yell it to the whole fleet," finishes Uderak over your head, like he never tried to trip you, and pokes you in the side with one foot.  "...brother, did you just bust your own cartilage nub on the floor?"

" _Didn't bust anything_ ," you say into the floor, and push yourself up before he can get on your back.  You've seen him choke out bigger than you like that.  (Not busted no, but you've got blood all over your lips and down your chin, you're bleeding and it stings.)  "--figure it'll get around though, that's all I'm gettin' my ask on for right now, you guess it'll spread?  Fuck."  You spit blood on the ground--your paint is getting smeary with it, so you make the most of it, spread it with your thumbs till it follows the line of your smile.  

Uderak fixes you with a sharp eye.  "...if you want me to spread a rumor about it and get it over fast, brother," he says, all sweet, and fakes at your left.  You're ready on the right--you get him in the side and he gets back away in a hurry, gasping.  "--you-- _just have to ask_ \--fuck, holy shit."

Others have stopped trying to get hold on their new bodies now, have started coming over and watching the two of you, big and small and circling at each other.  You talk quieter, so it's just you to him.

" _...not what I said._ "

" _No,_ " he says.  " _Just--_ hff-- _what you_ want. _Could tell--everybody here.  Right out loud.  You could._ "

You could.

You really--you fucking _could._

And in the second where you're blinking at him, gaping at the thought, he hauls right off and punches you right in the face.  Pops you right in the motherfucking _eye_ , saints and messiahs that is _it_ \--!

\--

_sinuousTormentor [ST] started pestering you._

ST: iiii'm just ssaying?

ST: you cooouuuld jussst...tell sssomeone?

You throw your palmhusk at Uderak across the mediculler bay, put the ice-grub back over your swelled-up purple-black eye, and sulk like the magnificent fucking adult you are.  

\--

You're still lying around in the mediculler bay, getting people poking at your arm and your leg and your side in its entireness basically (which is terrible and makes you have to take deep breaths because those bruises _ache_  and make you want more) when you hear shouting and you find out you got a visitor you weren't expecting.

"Holy shit," is the first thing Karkat says when he sees you.  "Holy fucking shit did you go find the bullshit saint who's in charge of pupation and make them your grovelling bitch or something?"

"We don't got a pupation saint," you say, and pull him down to the bed for hugs.  He's not done it yet, which is weird--you should have pupated a long time after him, him being so hot in the blood and all.  "--fuck, best friend, I missed you a shitload."

" _That can be your job,_ " he mumbles, "-- _you're the saint of idiots who grow ridiculous amounts during pupation and get freakishly tall like freaks.  It's you._ "  But he hugs you back and nuzzles up his face all tickling in your neck and you're real careful when you squeeze him and he's perfect.  

When you let him go he's wiping up his eyes and when you pat his cheek a couple of times he sniffs and glares up at you and doesn't cry anymore. You should have been able to tell him, he should have known you were cocooned and he should have come to see you before you went under, it's one of the oldest things, to have your moirail knowing and thinking of you while you're under, hoping you'll make it through whole.

...but you didn't realize you were cocooning until too late, and you weren't close enough to reach your husktop--who would've even told him?  ( _Kurloz?  Do you dare even hope._ )  You swing your legs out off the bed and sit up--stretch and it aches, but not too bad.  Uderak watches you across the room and you ignore him because he's bein' a little piss.  

"Okay," Karkat says.  "You want to walk and talk, or--hey!  No, don't even think about it.  Hands to yourself.  No.  Just because you're a monster now doesn't mean you get to pick me up and carry me around like a grub whenever you want to, you feculent piece of shit."

"But--"

"Besides, I hear those bruises on your face are literally from falling over your own feet."

Oh.  Well, yeah.  "...getting the hang on it," you mutter, and he rolls his eyes and pats your arm.  

Getting in that fight actually seems to have done good on you in the way of falling on your face.  You walk along with him and he only turns a little bit red when you hold his hand even though people stare at you a little.  You talk--he tells you about how he had to "exercise his authority" at one of the empress's dinners the other night, which it seems like to you means he got tired of gettin' shit-talked by a wader and pulled his sickles and demanded a fight.  He got that fucker on the ground with his sickle in their gills before they knew what was up, and you wish you coulda been there to stop him, even if he pulled off before anybody had to.  Would've been downright motherfuckin' romantic.  

You tell him Kurloz finally fucked you for real and once he gets through hitting you in the stomach for making him think about that, he looks kind of pleased at you.

"I didn't think he'd go that far," he says.  "Well, good for him, at least he's committed.  God only knows what kind of fucked-up slurry that's going to make."

"Don't think we, uh."  Shit, now you're thinking back on it you don't hardly remember the last half of that day.  Karkat glances up at you, and the words catch up in your squawk-blister.  "--don't... _think_  we, y'know..."

He's still looking up at you, and you're surprised when all of a sudden he grins.

" _That_  you're embarrassed by?"  He says, and actually for-real _laughs_.  " _That_  is the part you can't actually say?  You just literally said, out loud, 'he actually fucked me the other day, filled me up for real' and now you can't actually say the words 'filled a pail'?  Oh my god."

Shit, it's true though, the words make your face go all purple and hot.  Karkat won't stop laughing at you.

" _Shut the fuck up,_ " you grumble at him, and he seems to notice you're not finding this shit as amusin' as he is (downright disgraceful, but not as sinful as tryin' to laugh at shit that doesn't strike you funny for real).  He stops and takes your arm.

"Hey," he says, and pulls a little bit.  You don't want to, but you let him bend you down toward him and when he touches your face you forget a little bit of how mad you were.  "Hey man, come on."

"... _'s not funny, is all,_ " you say, and try to pull your arm away--Karkat holds on.

"Gamzee," he says, and it's sharp enough you listen.  "I'm not...goddammit.  I'm not making fun of you or anything.  I'm not even making fun of your weird matespritship, okay?  It makes you happy, I'm not going to shit on that, I'm not that big of a festering pusbucket.  It's just...funny.  The kind of shit you end up being all shy about when I bet you could literally describe your matesprit's bulge to me in loving detail and not even hesitate."

You...guess you see what's he's sayin'.  You have to breathe hard and slow to get rid of the tense ache in your back, but it helps when he puts his hand on your face and keeps on touching you, bringing you back down.  He pats your cheek one last time, and this time you can kind of smile at him.  

He sighs and looks up and down the hallway and then leans up and bumps his nugbone up against yours. 

"You should ask him," he says, and you set off walking down the hallway together again.  "What happened, I mean.  And what happens, when..." he stops for a second.  "...when you hit drone season again."

\--

The first thing Kurloz does is laugh.

"What, filled an actual pail?" he finishes for you, and you shouldn’t have taken off your paint before you came to talk to him, because you can feel your face all purple down to your shoulders.  "…no, brother.  We didn’t talk before we did it and I didn’t figure you could talk about it after we started.  So…no."

"How's that...?" you start, and then figure you don't actually know what you got to say.  You shut your stupid flap again and he does that look at you where he raises up his eyebrows and smiles at you. _Really, wriggler_?

"How's what?"

"Drone season, like," you say, and hurry up on before he can tell you about pails like the smug-ass fucker he is.  You got off-planet before they called you for pails, and you found others on the ships who needed as you did.  Needed you just and solely for the bits you never even gave a thought much too back on-planet, beyond hurting yourself and gasping into the day..."--up here, up in the ships, and now I'm...?"

"…Yeah, you never had an adult drone season yet, did you, littlest motherfucker?"  He reaches out, rubs a thumb up your cheek and tweaks your ear.  "…haven’t had a rut yet.  That’ll be a thing…"  And then he blinks and he seems to look on you for real, see your face.  Takes his hand back and coughs a little bit.  "I’m Grand Highblood," he says.  "I got no need to contribute if I don’t want.  And you neither, if you…" and he pauses a space of a breath.  

"… _if I claim you mine_ ,” he finishes, soft and quiet and almost gentle, and he's looking somewhere else, like he's thinking and seeing something in his pan you can't get your peep on at.  ” _For real.  For all.  For anybody to see._ ”

Oh messiahs.  You did not fucking ask for this, holy fuck you need to get _warned_ before serious shit like this goes down.

"…what…" you start, and your gabflap sticks at the top of your mouth, you can’t get words out of you.  You have to swallow real hard.  "…what if…I _do_  want to…fill a pail with you?”

You can’t speak to the expression on his face, the meaning of it, how he looks your face over.  Is he happy to share with you, or is he unhappy to not make the pair of you known?  Which does he want more?  You don’t even know.  

"…then you turn it in," he says.  "—and nobody has rights to question.  I can—"

“ _And_ …” you say, and he stops, listening.  ”And if I—want—to be yours...too…?”

That word _too_  makes his hands clutch on the arms of his throne and then loosen up again, and you know this time you ain't imagining when you see his big shoulders settle down a little with a sigh he don't let out.  

"...tired of this too, huh?" he says, and you have to nod because yeah.  Yeah you really kinda are.  ( _You could just...tell someone...?_ )

"What happens then?" you ask him, and he closes his mouth up tight for a while before he lets to speak.  When he does, his voice is kinda far-off, but there's a little smile on his lips.  You stare at them instead of looking him in the eyes, and you see the scar under his paint, the slightest twitch like a sneer to his lip where that scar crosses his maw all crooked.  The shadow where jaw goes to soft throat, the muscle up under his skin that tightens up when he's got stuff on his pan to think on.  Tiniest things.  

Your things.

"...you figure me for a messiah?" he asks you, and you know by that little twitch up all pulling tight at the corners of his mouth that the question ain't for real and he knows you wouldn't blaspheme at him so.  You warm in the face again anyway.  "I can't speak on what's coming down on us, little one, ain't no single motherfucker alive who can do that and _any who says they can, well...they're fucking_  lying."

You shiver a little then, because his voice goes cold for a breath or two like he's thinkin' on heresies you got no know of.  Then he shakes his head slow and the cold is gone again.  He looks...tired.  Tired as he slumps forward and leans on his knees, tired as he reaches up and puts a hand passing-fast over his eyes and then away.  As he looks up at you and smiles, but with a waiting fear to his smile that makes you sad and needing to see.

"...I can't say," he says.  "I can guess, maybe, motherfucking get my guess on of them all not making moves to fight me on it.  They'll not go for me, but brother you know who they'll get a go on at instead."

Your pusher tightens all up like it does when he kisses you, and you get a fierce sting in your oculars and a choking in your squawk blister that you can't blink off.  But he's wrong, that's not it-- "I'm barely nobody though," you say, and he blinks and furrows up his face at you all frowning-like.  "You got everything in your hands, brother you got the more to drop--"

"You're motherfucking _vulnerable,_ " he starts, and you're talking at the same time as him, starting at saying "--you got so much you could _lose_  on me--"

You both quit.  You both look.  You both frown, and it's the same frown and you know it is.  

"...wrigglers are unmellow in their fucking bloodpushers yet, they'll give you shit, but I'm not within the reach of you young ones and there ain't a single thing in the scripture about this for them to throw at me." And you know from his voice that that's true, that you could look every scripture through and not find a word about it.  "There's no reproach on me."

"Nah, my kin and brothers and sisters and all won't grief me about this," you argue back, and he grumbles out a noise between his teeth, not quite grown to be a growl.  "But you--you got older ones who'll go behind you and motherfucking _whisper,_  you got a throne to hold--"

"And I'll hold it," he says sharp, voice rising and horns coming down--you would stand your ground even before, but there's some piece now that prickles your vertebral column and hisses in your ear to lower your horns back, step up and growl. _He wants a fight,_  your body says, and you scare yourself at how new that is, that _snap_  in your fronds that makes your fingers spread for clawing. _A fight you should MOTHERFUCKING OFFER IN RETURN._  "--as long as I got you safe! _You think I would_ \--?!"

He stops.  

You stop.  

You both take breaths to each other, his in and yours out, his out and yours in, and you both lean a little back of each other.  His eyes fade orange-gold to yellow--you wonder if you got the very same thing moving on through you.  Looks pretty bitchtits, but you don't like it when he gets a look at you like that.  Don't like to piss him off.  But he needs to _get it._

"...if you're sure you won't get any shit for it," he says finally, real slow, "...and... _I'm_ motherfucking sure to sit steady through whatever comes...then what the _fuck_  are we arguing about?"

You laugh all in startlement, and the burn to growl at him fades off.  You'll ask him, you have to, you'll ask him on it later, but not now.  You don't want to bring that shit to this time when he just broke the tense up in his fingers like a snapped fingerbone.  

"I want you safe," you say, and he sighs and raises his lookstubs up at the messiahs and the blood on the arches above.

"You know I killed the last Grand Highblood," he says.

You do know--you do, but still do you jump a little inside.  "...yeah," you say.

"Fight lasted two nights and a day between," he says, and his eyes go far off again and still.  "...I was a scrawny wriggler still but I was fast.  End of the day, he took my stumble and tore the clubs out of my hands with his and I knew he would paint my motherfucking panmatter to shine his throne if I didn't get his club off him in take-alike.  So you know what I did?"

You think you do.  You think you know, looking at him, you think you can see him all raw-bone lean and blood-dripping and black-purple with the blows rained on him, hands empty and eyes all blazing.  You can imagine the vast shadow over him.  You can see it all miraculous clear.  

"...took the hit," you guess, and your voice sounds small and frail, far-off while you watch that bright picture in your head.  "Take it as soon as you could before you had to take worse."

He laughs, soft and singular and almost motherfucking fond.

"He got me here," he says, and you blink and look at him and see him put a hand at his side, the curve of his thoracic cage.  "Took all my weight throwing back against him to pull it out of his hands, and I went over back so hard and so fast when he tried to hit me again all he hit was where I'd been."

You see that too, the ancient old club spinning off into the dark, hear the roar, see Kurloz rolling back and getting up in the same second, and there'd be blood down his chin but he'd be motherfucking _smiling_  like he just pulled back the greatest tent flap and saw the first bright hint of true Mirth, back in the fight and ready, he'd be so motherfucking _beautiful._

"... _grappled him for the night after that,_ " says Kurloz far off, like not to break the dream.  " _Body and mind.  That night tasted like blood, little one.  That night felt like his god-given voodoos rattling around in my thinkpan so's I still dream his maw in my 'coon at night..._

 _"..._ and then it was done."

You didn't think of your body for that dark, shining sweep that passed on through your thinkpan.  You come back to and hear yourself breathe all deep and slow and feel your fronds shaking-cold.  Kurloz is watching you now, and you get a feeling all up and down your motherfucking bone-struts that he's watching how it takes you, wondering if he said too much at you.

"Wasn't a great thing," he says, and his voice is all hard, so hard you jump.  "Don't go thinking that death was a glory in itself.  Death is a joy, seeing a brother or sister go to the messiahs, but ' _this itself not a glory_ \--"

"--more glorious far to walk on and trail paint where you walk," you finish for him, not over-patient but motherfucking breathless from listening.  He looks shock at you, then fond again.

"...yeah, fucking church," he says.  "...wasn't glory in that death.  We were both goin' down, half-dead, and I got up one more time than him.  Got to him and got my claws around his throat, and we knew I'd won it."

He stops there.  Looks down at his hands and curls his claws like he's remembering how they cut into a gulping throat, the sound of the wet choking of blood in their aeration sponges, the harsh in-out in-out of their lives going on, one soon to end.

"Handed me up the knife," he says, and then he is holding it, the knife of kind death, the blade of Messiahs' taking.  He holds it strange and gentle, as gentle as touching your face, like holding harder can hurt it. 

".. _.like the highblood before gave to him_ ," he says, distant and clear.  "... _and the one before, to her.  And on into where no motherfucker remembers._ I'm the longest-lived of them yet, I know."  He looks up at you.  "I'm safe," he says.

"..but..."

"I'm _safe,"_  he says again, and his eyes are hot and hard and bright.  "I've lived longer since then than any other troll who wasn't damned down to sea and dark and breath of water.  In that time, little brother, I've had kin from the church try for my life, but no more than I could count on my two hands, I will be _safe_  by the strength of my own two motherfucking arms and this throne and my faith to the Messiahs.  And I will be _safe_  because my belief is good church money and because I am the very _motherfucking bitch-tits._ "

You open your mouth to say something, but you choke through it, your ganderbulbs burning and your squawkblister squeezing tight.  He nods at you slow and gentle.

"I'll be safe," he says again.  "If you'll let me take you--I'll swear on my life that you will be too."

"I never doubted," you say, but when it comes out, it comes out small and shaking and like a prayer.  "Never motherfucking doubted that, brother."

"Then let an old troll indulge in sayin' it to himself," he says, and grins at you, your same smile higher on one side.  "Motherfucker, what we got to be scared of?"  He sits back, and he looks so tired still but he looks keen and burning and sweet at you.

"...not a single motherfucking thing, bro," you say, and he smiles at you all his white fangs and nods, just the one time.  

He doesn't have to reach out at you--you come up on your own and slide up with him.  It's tighter up there with the two of you fitting than it was, but you're big enough now the tips of your horns touch on his and slide up and down the ridges and turns and you get shivers up and down you.

"...Love," he says finally, and settles his arms around you, and it's not quite just him holding you anymore--you get a frond up and get it in behind him, so your hand is up on the back of his neck.  "You said our slipperiest little brother has a thought on how to spread it around?"

"He doesn't think anybody's gonna believe it," you warn, and he laughs. 

"Yeah," he says, half a laugh.  "Some fuckers can't see a miracle like this even when it's right under their snuff-nodes."

You go as purple as you've ever been at that, same as you always do when he calls you "miracle".  You should tell him to stop--you're no miracle, not to a single motherfucker, you're a mess and a failure ( _a failure in all ways, a failure who sees his brothers and sisters dying in agony, and that failure sits on your thorax in the day and sinks its cold claws at your aeration sacs so you can't fucking_ breathe--) and you're a nuisance and you're no miracle and no blessing.  But you're weak and you're shit and you can't bring yourself to asking him to stop.

"Stop thinking dumb shit, leaksponge," he tells you, and you jump and squeak and then melt all over when he puts his mouth at your horn and his teeth clicks at the bases just hard enough to threaten.  "Tell Uderak to spread his rumors.  Careful-like."

"Yessir."

He pushes you up away from him onto your feet and stands up himself behind you, stretching up his arms to the sky. You poke at his side while his arms are up--he clicks startled in the back of his throat and slaps you, meaty _crack_  of his palm on flesh and then the sharp sting.  You make a noise considerable more embarrassing than the one you won from him, and he laughs at you.  

"Get about your day, wriggler," he orders you.  "You got another two night before you can take missions again--use 'em.  And _tomorrow..._ " he fixes you a look that makes your mouth go dried up and your skin shiver.  "...you come up to my rooms.  I've got something for you."

"What?"

He raises up his eyebrows at you again, what a smug piece of shit.

"Motherfucker of mystery, me," he says, and waves you off to the door.  "Go.  Speak to Uderak.  Train up that fine new body of yours." He grins all his teeth at you.  "... _drink a lot of water and get a good sleep_ ," he finishes off, and it's that low half-growl, that hungry purr, and you know he wants you strong before he tears you to pieces. 

You shake, and bow, and do what he tells you.


	14. Tool Of Your Destruction

Your name is Kurloz Makara and you get off on hurting.

Not on you hurting, ain't a thing you're fond of any more than any other troll.  On the hurting of other bodies, other minds.  You want to twist things and break them.  You want to bleed them and cut them and burn them and do little pains on them to see them twitch.  You want to _hurt_ , and you got a matesprit as wants you hurting him, and that's perfect and serendipity-given and great.

But things still _gnaw_ at you.

Your control ain't the total and sum.  Your making him feel good don't make him feel good.  Your making him feel good takes him off, far off and _scared_ and you don't know what to do but to dig at that and worry it away like you do every other fucking thing, has ever bothered you.   _Why_?  Why can't he take both the same, why can't he at least even bear to feel good? 

So you’re gonna do exactly what you always do when you don’t get how something goes together.

You’re gonna take it apart.

But you’ll have and hold this time, you will _have and fucking hold._   You’ll have care this time, and watch as you break him, you’ll take care of every piece of him in every second, and you’re going to find him out and take it apart from him and _learn_ him.

You ain’t ever been so tense to see your door open as you are while you wait for the hours to pass.  You wonder in your worrying at how fast and far the rumors are spreading, who knows already _Gamzee Makara’s fucking the Grand Highblood_ and who’ll be setting a sight on him now, hoping to use and abuse and tear him apart.  He’ll be a way to get to you.  He’ll be a weakness.  (Except he ain’t ever been weak, truly, not the way they would think of it.)  He’ll be a _way in._

Your teeth grind thinking on that, that people would look at him that way.  But…you knew what you were getting into, didn’t you?  You fuckin’ knew.  So did he, for all he’s so sure you’re the one’ll get shit out of this. 

In all your thinking you’ve prowled your hall up and down, and it’s for that very motherfuckin’ reason you’re right there by the door when it cracks open.  It’s all instinct, hundreds on hundreds of subjugglation sending you back into the shadows by the door like you’re ready to crush his thinkpan with your clubs.

Gamzee edges in, all dazzled from the bright outside, looks around for you and doesn’t mark you there in the dark behind the door.  It is downright motherfucking precious the way he looks around for you eager, the way his face falls when he don’t see you at your throne.

He comes forward into the room, and you step in behind him silent as breathing.

“ _Hey there, wriggler,_ ” you whisper, inches away from his skin, and he _shrieks_ and dives forward, rolls up facing you with his clubs out.  You laugh so hard you just about piss yourself, so hard you can’t even fucking breathe and every bit of your thorax is all cramped up with laughing.  At that same moment you’re pleased at him for it, pleased that’s how he’ll do when some other motherfucker comes up behind him.  That was good form and all, he drew good and fast.

And then you get all the bits of your pan together and smile at him and his eyes clear and you take a wave of lust like a slap in the face.  Holy _fuck_ you forgot the smell, pheromones and sweat and a newly-pupated lover still prime for drone season, the air is so thick with _fuck me FUCK ME_ all of a sudden you can’t hardly breathe.  He smelled of want before, but that was want in sweat and heat and slurry, and this is another thing all and together.  Pure motherfucking _lust_ in the air.  It’s a beautiful goddamn thing.

“Lock the door,” you tell him, and he hurries his ass right up to obey you as you walk on up to your throne, predatory on purpose, a stalk like you’re hunting and you can feel his eyes on your back.  “Come here and get naked.”

You like to change that up—strip him bit by bit or make him get naked fast and shivering, strip him off fast and rough yourself or have him do it  for you nice and slow.  This time when he rushes to strip bare you don’t growl at him to slow down; by the time you’re back to the throne, he’s naked and following after you. 

“Okay okay, I’m motherfuckin’ clothes-free.” He edges up in your space, and you gotta smile.  So needy, the wriggler is.  “You gonna fuck me now?”

“No,” you say, and smile at how that makes him slump down, disappointed.  “Not yet.”

“Well what _first_?” he says, and there’s a hint of the littler one you used to know in his voice, a little whine and whimper.  “Come on—“

"You got this pretty new body and I just want to see it in action first," you say, innocent as a new believer, and press up close and sudden to push his arms real gentle behind his back.  Fold them so there’s a wrist by each elbow and tie them nice and tight so his shoulders pull back.  And then, because you love to watch and you got extra rope left and because hell, why not—you take his chin, tilt his head back and tie it at his horns so his head has to tip up.  So he has to look up at you. 

Takes less than a minute and he’s breathless when you pull away, jostled and shocked and wide-eyed on you.  He pulls at his hands—licks his lips, and the smell of him hits you again full force. 

“ _Oh,_ ” he says, and you trail your fingers down from his pretty lips to the sweet jut of his thoracic bone just to watch him shiver and go all tensed up.  “ _…oh…_ ”

“Yeah, oh,” you agree, and if you focus, if you think on it the right way, you can just find the place to go in your head…just the right…

You know when it works because his eyes go wide and his knees buckle under him.  Yeah, there’s a trick he won’t have learned yet.  Most trolls ain’t got the time or the inclination to practice gettin’ control on their bodies base-ass doings, but there’s not a trick handier for making your intentions known than pouring off pheromones like a goddamn waterfall. 

Gamzee goes over as you knew he would, and you hear the beautiful dull noise of cartilaginous joint cushioning on the metal floor.  He gasps the ache and pang of it in a strangled curse, and you get down on one knee and trace a considering claw up the slit of his nook and over the sheath of his bulge.  His breath goes fast and his eyes squeeze shut—you press up nice and gentle against his chin with one finger until his mouth closes enough to kiss it, and he moans into your mouth and squirms up against his ropes.  He’s so fucking turned on already, you can smell it—all the new chemicals and pheromones he hasn’t gotten any notion of control over yet, this gorgeous hot haze of need in the air around him. 

“ _I like you down here,_ ” you tell him, and he swears quietly to himself, squirming around on his knees.  You have so much you could do to him right now, you could—no, but you have a goddamn _plan_ and if you don’t’ follow it why the hell would you make it at all?  You swallow that down and stand up, back to your throne to get the thing you brought for him this time.  “ _…stay.”_

It’s a strange thing, not troll-made, something Meenah stole from aliens before she crushed them. Simple enough, just something to sit on, a toy you know won’t be quite enough on its own, won’t quite satisfy.  When you lower him down on it he twitches, and then groans when he feels how it’s small for him, how it reaches just deep enough to touch places that make him shiver, just broad enough at the base that it makes him grind down on it wanting more width that just ain’t there.  You watch his face as his eyes look far off into the distance and his mouth falls open and he rocks, feeling it, getting used.

You’re not gentle when you take his legs and fold them up on either side of the thing, and he takes deep breaths and then whimpers when you fasten the straps, when you give him a sharp slap on the ass to make him struggle, watching to make sure he’s got no room in the straps to get away.

"What—" he says, and then chokes off as you crook a finger and the thing slides inside him, never smooth enough to be as good as a bulge, but clever and strange and following your motions enough to…

…yeah, and you know you’ve found the spot when he gasps and arches his back so pretty he might even be showing off for you on purpose.  All that grown-dark flesh and there’s a trickle of sweat running down his belly as he shivers, closes his eyes, face turned up to you and purple down to his shoulders…

You sit back and away from him, crook your finger again and watch as it reads your hand’s moving and watch as he whines and jerks around. 

"What—you—" he gets out, and then you flick a finger hard and fast and he wails.  He pulls at the ropes around his arms as you do it again, again, lashing at him, but he can’t get free and his bared throat works around his cries, vulnerable and helpless.

You walk back and up to your throne, sit down and lounge like a decadent warlord from the days when trolls were barely animals, from the days when wars were for petty land and little rulers traded their slaves for servants or butchery or for pleasure. 

"Suits you," you tell him, and he gets his eyes open and sees you up there, sitting back and playing with him from far off, where you can see his reaction, where you can watch him as he whimpers for you. 

You can see the moment he realizes you have no intention of coming down to touch him with your own hands, see the look on his face when he knows this is all he’s going to get and that you’re going to torture him so hard with this.  You see the moment he realizes how hard you’re going to break him and that's the moment where you start it up with a soft, sharp little buzz.

He doubles over and _keens_ , and you see his arms tense like he wants to pull them free, push himself away, touch himself, who knows—he comes up short on the cuffs and the moment of realizing helplessness is fucking _gorgeous._   Under his darker skin you can see the muscles shift and strain and pull, his new horns just enough longer you love to watch him toss his head and struggle, all that elegant length of red and gold.  You loved him before and you love him now, but there’s a change about it, about the sight of him and the smell of his lust in the air, something whispers to your pan _yes_ and _this is right so right_ and it’s not just you and a wriggler who hung on you, it’s an adult you’re tearing to fucking shreds.

“No mercy,” you tell him, mild as sopor, and turn the vibration up another notch just to watch the way he thrashes, watch the shudders travel down his spine and through his stomach, the way his thighs tense up in their straps but can’t pull free. 

It takes a handful of minutes for you to tear your self away from watching him whine and twitch like he does, but when you do you see his head toss, his thin feet twitch and his toes curl.  It’s a new thing, that feeling.  You ain’t surprised his pan doesn’t know what to do with it. 

"...don't get a lot of these in our empire," you say, and nudge it with a toe--he makes a cracking sound as the jolt shakes him where he sits.  "Close-panned dumbasses figuring if it moves and you put it in your nook it better be alive."  Not that a highblood would have a use for some kind of lowblood sex parasite, but you are mightily fucking disappointed in your castes' abilities to come up with their own toys.  Lowbloods get all the goddamn fun.  “But they’re motherfucking quality.  Moves easier in you than my fingers, too, and it don’t…quite… _satisfy._ ”  Every word you give him another slow curl and he twitches and squeezes shut his eyes. 

“ _Wh_ —” he starts, beginning of a question, but he can’t make the words, and you sure as fuck ain’t going to help him out.  He loses it again a second later anyway.

"Not just for my personal entertainment, this," you tell him idly, and he shudders and whines and he tries, oh he does try, you can see it in his face, he tries to listen and look at you, but he can't quite focus.  "I got things I want to know.  Shit I want to get my _understand_ on of." 

He laughs, but it's half a sound, a strangled little breath of a thing.  It's fucking gorgeous.  You gotta make him laugh more next time.  You ease your moving and watch him, wait till he’s got himself gathered up again.  “What’s funny?”

"You--wanted answers-- _fuck_ , brother—” his head tosses, his breath catches up.  “—you want answers, you, you picked a b-bad motherfucking time to _fuck_ shit _messiahs'_ mercy _holy_ shit _ahh--_ "

"That shit is bordering on downright irreverence," you say, mild, and crook your finger hard towards you, grind the machine hard and vicious on the front wall of his nook, up and down the line of spots that make his head snap back and make him shout out and writhe around.  But he can't get away from it.  Goddamn but he is such a fine sight with all that's new and changed in him, you enjoy yourself playing around with him until he's shaking and there's sweat on his nose and around his eyes and his lip is swelled up purple from biting.

You can't get enough of watching him, but if you keep that shit up he _really_ won't be answering your questions, so you sigh regret and give him rest, let him slump down and suck in air in great gasps that stretch his thorax and heave his bones under his skin.  "...you mind your mouth, wriggler, or I'll have your answers in screams."

" _You'll fucking have that already_ ," he rasps out, quiet so you figure he's mostly talking to himself--you laugh to let him know you heard, and he colors so pretty and fine. 

"Maybe I will," you allow, and he groans, long and low as heartache.  "But answers I will have." 

You don’t bother to speak to him again for minutes, stretched-out agonies of time that leave him wrung-out and shaking and dripping sweat.  His screams spiral up and up, not higher but louder, tearing and needing-desperate.   You wait and watch him cry out.  You wait and see him break down in his helplessness. 

You wait until he’s a pleading mess, until all he can say at you is _please please please_. 

And then you stop.

His scream goes on in the silence for another second, rings out and echoes as you come down from your throne and kneel down in front of him.  He’s sobbing every breath, tears all down his face and he looks miserable and he looks lifted and ecstatic and he’s shaking so hard his fangs clatter together of it.

“ _What is it_?” you ask, and your voice comes out hushed but he jumps at it anyway, shakes his head over and over, shapes those words, _please please please please…_   “What’s wrong with this, wriggler?  What’s got in you and made a home there, what’s _wrong_?”

" _Scared,_ " he chokes out, and for all you already figured that for yourself, it's a pain and a distress on your pusher to hear it.  You hold his face in your hands and watch the change and shift of his expressions, his squeezed-shut eyes.  " _I need to--_ "

"You don't need me to hurt you," you tell him, and he whimpers and shakes his head, slow and steady, over and over and over again.  "You don't --"

And then a terrible, terrible thought comes burning into your pan.  Word at a time, like the burning of sunrise. 

"...you're worth more to me," you say, slow and taking every word with care, "...than when I hurt you.  You know that shit, don't you?"

" _Yes,_ " he croaks, but you stroke a rough knuckle over his bulge and the pleasure wracks him and the word breaks out of him before he can hold it in, before he can do more than gasp a breath.  "--but--!"

The word is a fist in the guts. 

" _'But'_ what?"  You take his shoulder, shake him a little and he cries out as he rocks on the toy in his nook.  You're breaking him, you know it, you're getting to something inside him but to get it out you're going to have to fucking _tear._ "But what, but ‘ _what if’_?  But ‘ _what else am I good for’_?"

He flinches at those both, and you know you've hit home.  He turns his face from you and you know him for his fear; you come around back of him instead, put your arms around him and press him back against you so he don’t have to meet your eyes. You've gotten to his thinkpan with telling him over and over and he _knows,_ knows you won’t leave him, but in his pusher there’s still that _doubt,_ that goddamn poison of fear that whispers at him _what else are you good for_ and _he'll leave you alone_.  If he can come without the pain you give him, if he doesn't look to you for hurting, why should you want him? 

( _If he doesn't need you to hurt him, why should he want you_?)

"... _I won’t leave,”_ you say to him, barely a breath, and he makes a wretched sound, agonized and ashamed.  “ _I won’t leave, I won’t go anywhere, I’ll have you, I’ll hold onto you little one, I promise—"_

 _"_ I, _"_ he says, barely a word, gasping and sobbing and _broken_ , " _If I--I can--if you--_ "

"Doesn't matter," you say, and it doesn't matter what he's got in his pan, what he's scared of, it _doesn't fucking matter._   He lets out a desperate, wordless noise when you gently stroke his bulge, this awful, fucking wonderful half-a-scream.  There’s a frenzy all getting on up into him, eating him from the core out and taking him away from you, there’s something that scares him and you don’t want him in fear. 

“Never leavin’," you promise him, and he’s so close you can almost feel it, almost feel how he’ll shudder and hear him scream, “Just let go, brother, just let all that go, I’ll take care of you I got you just—”

And you drop a single kiss on the back of his neck, taste the sweat and feel him shudder and—

That’s it.  That’s the moment, the second something snaps.  One second he's all frenzy and fear and every part of him is a single sob, _can't I can't I can't I can't_ and the next second he’s shaking himself to pieces with helpless little cries through the soft slack gentleness of his mouth, your fingers are all stained purple.  He don't scream out like you're used to--don't make hardly a sound but a harsh gasping breath and a soft cry on his breaths, nearly sighing _ahh, ah ahhh--_

And he slumps over like you’ve killed him, let's out a single great, huge breaking sob and cries like heartbreak.

Your bulge is fucking aching, been so sweet just watching him, but all of a sudden that’s hardly important.  He lies crumpled up against you and cries and cries and you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t get him to say a word, he just sobs.  Nothing like fear to shut down pailing need sharp as necks snapping; fear of what you’ve done hacks at your backbone and you forget about every single fucking thing you were just thinking and hold on to him.  You turn him back against you to kiss his sweaty forehead and when you fumble his hands out of their ropes the first thing he does is put his arms as much around you as he can and hold on so tight it almost aches.

“I," is the first thing he says, so broken up you almost can’t tell it’s a word and not just a gasp, "I, I-I, fuck—”

You dig your claws nice and gentle into his back, just enough to sting, and he gasps and settles, just a little, just enough to breathe.  He doesn’t stop crying, but he’s not struggling to get the air to sob anymore.

“Still okay?" you ask, and he whines and hides his face in your neck—whines again, short and harsh, almost a whimper, when the toy still in his nook doesn’t shift with him.  "Talk to me Gamzee.  Words would be greatly fucking appreciated.”

“…did it,” he says, so soft you almost don’t hear him, and there’s sheer disbelief in his voice.  ”…I…that—fuck—”

“Most surely you motherfucking did," you murmur, and rock him a little, scoot him forward so you can get your hands at the buckles around his legs.  "Won’t do that again any time soon, no fear, shhhh no fear now.  You did good.  Did what you didn’t figure you could.  Shhhh…What the fuck happened?”

" _Like_ \-- _"_ he gulps and gasps, tries to get his voice to obey him--it cracks and shakes and it's so precious you just want to squeeze him till he bruises.  "Like--I-I just... _fell_ , like, I--"

"Okay. Okay okay, you're good, that's good, _shh_." You finish the straps and lift him back and away--the whole mess of where he was sitting is purple and slick and your hands don't know what to do without him to untie--you pet his hair and prickle at him with your claws instead, feeling across his skin like any hurt you did him with your gentleness would be there for your fingertips to find.  "You’re a blessing truly fuckin’ granted, always were and will be brother, you’re just fine—”

“ _Fuck me._ ”

Your bulge almost ties itself right in a fuckin’ knot.  You just about choke on your own elocution flap. 

“Say again now?”

“ _Please,_ ” he says, like that’s the problem you’re taking from this, like you were set to withhold on account of rudeness, “Come on please Kurloz please, brother set me right—”

Your bulge is all up for it, _so_ goddamn up for it, but that makes you laugh at him, at his fucking _endless_ appetite, boy is a star gone dark and hungry, a hole in the stars and you could fuck him forever and not satisfy.

"You just came, you greedy little shit," you say, mocking stern frowning, and he gets right back at you by keeling himself over on his back and spreading out right there on the floor.  There are smears of his slurry on the floor under him, he's wrecked and shaking and he gives you a look that's like pleading and it makes your breath stop. 

" _Hard,_ " he orders, and that's all he gets out before you grab him and slam him flat on the cold metal of the floor.  His body lifts to meet yours--you get a hand on his side and press him down until your thumb sinks into the line of his hip and coats slick and cool in blood, and he gasps under you.  Your other hand finds his leg--slides down the bare slim muscle in his thigh and come to the back of his knee, wrenching his leg back and out until it strains at the joints.  He cries out and tries to reach for his bulge, touch himself—you growl and he shudders and stills.

“ _—take it now I can take it I can I can do it_ ,” the words come out all in a rush, this long, breathless prayer-mantra as he rocks towards you, tries to get to your bulge, _fuck_ this wriggler is going to kill you one day.  “I can do it brother please fuck please give me all of it tear me up _please_ —“

He’s grown since the first time and it’s good, it’s no longer a wavering edge of _too tight_ and aching but goddamn but he is still so _fucking_ _tight_ and when you drive into him he screams out so fine for you and arches up and off the ground, worked-out muscles trembling all through him.  You don’t go slow and cautious this time like you did then; you slam him hard and mean and he claws the ground and makes beautiful goddamn noises.  You gone and ruined him, really and truly, and all his sharp pretty teeth show when he screams again, he shakes and shivers around your bulge and it feels fucking _wonderful._   You tell him so, keep your pan together enough to growl at him how good he is, how _good_ he feels, how tight and how precious—how pretty is his pain.

You got no need to tease him now, not after you tortured him so long already.  You press down over him until his legs curl around you, lean over him and grind him down under you and kiss him and it doesn’t take long before he’s crying out and shaking and coming again, dragging out long and painful and glorious.  It’s a strain on him, twice in so short a time, but he’s smiling as he falls back, head leaned back in the ecstasy of saints and martyrs.  He licks his lips; groans sweet and soft as you sit up and bring him back to the throne, slump down with him.  You worked him so hard and you shouldn’t push him harder, but your bulge is mightily un-fucking-happy with you for that thought and you make a noise you’re ashamed of when you lift him up a bit, let his nook get a break of mercy.  You were fucking _close_ but you can’t keep working at him.  You _can’t_ , you’re like to kill him as to make him come again, if the coming didn’t finish him off itself.

But then you jump a bit, because Gamzee doesn’t just lie there still.  He moves, shifts around on you all shaky and wobbly and his hands wander across your chest, his lips move slow on your skin. 

“ _Hey,_ ” he mumbles, and his broken voice is so precious and you groan before you can stop yourself at the ache it sends through you pusher to bulge.  “ _…y…ain’t done yet._ ”

“Hush, little one,” you tell him, kiss his hair and try to reach around him to take care of that your own self.  “Got this.  Go to sleep.”

\--but he don’t hush, he keeps moving and he catches at your frond, pulls back real gentle and you shift uneasy  but let him. "You're covered in sticky," you point out, and he huffs out a tired laugh and just drags himself around against you anyway.  "Gettin' your slurry all over me, that your revenge?"

" _Aw, brother_ ," he says, and that’s all he says before he just cozies up against you and slides his fingers up into your nook.

You keep your hands clenched on the arms of your chair, and don’t make a shaky sound.  ”…the fuck are you doing, wriggler,” you say, as steady as you can. 

" _Just…makin’ a motherfucker feel good_ ," he says, and there’s something about his face, his shivering little voice, that makes your bloodpusher shake.  He puts his face in your shoulder and kisses your throat gently and some inside part of you tenses up still and pleased.  "Just want you to feel good."  And then he pulls away a little and you see his precious face, so new but so familiar, you see his wide, worried eyes and the places the scars used to be, the curls of his hair hanging across his skin.  "…does feel good, right?"  he asks, and you laugh and then catch yourself on a groan when his fingers twitch gentle. 

"No worries on that score," you tell him, and he grins.  "Mind your claws, little one, can’t promise if you don’t I won’t all tear your head off before I think about it."  He nods, all big eyes and care.  He knows it's a true threat--just thinking on that kind of pain makes your claws all twitchy and your legs want to close.  But he wants to do you something for once, and after all the use you've got from him you figure it's only what's right to let him.

Besides, for all he obviously hasn't got a fucking clue what he's doing, it feel real goddamn nice.  You let your head drop back and just enjoy, because you can feel him watchin' you and listening, takin' in every little noise, every flicker on your face and shift of your body as he fumbles and tries to find the way of moving he's getting his search on for.  You feel more like a goddamn monarch than you have in a hundred sweeps, gettin' all _waited_ on and shit. 

Your bulge has got a lot of use over the sweeps, but you don't let a single fucking thing near your nook and it's a different thing whole and entire, like a big hand taking a full grip of your guts down low above his fingers.  When he twitches his claws (so short and dull, clipped so as not to mess up what shouldn't be --did he plan this, did he know when he came to you?) it's like that hand tugs a little, just enough as so you jerk with it, twitch and shiver up and down your legs.  First instinct’s prickling up your horns, _stay still_ and strong on your pan _can’t let him effect you_.  Burning at you, _control control gotta stay in control_ and he doesn’t deserve that shit.  He should fucking know, right?  He should know how good he is, the little bright points of his fingers moving and making every bit of you tighten up down in your insides, how goddamn precious he is when he forgets to breathe from watching your face. 

You move your leg to let him in, lean your head back and give him a long, slow smile, and he whimpers like you’re the one with your fingers up his nook.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he says, hoarse and tiny, and his cheeks are full purple, his fingers still and shake for a second.  ”Kurloz, _fuck_ —“

“Didn’t tell you to quit.” You growl for him—you know how that takes him, and he whines and you’d swear he wants to go again.  “Deeper than that.  _Slower._ ” Oh, fuck yes.  That’s goddamn gorgeous.  “Up—mmm, _hell_ yes, good boy.” Your hand finds his head, pets his horns and his head, tugs him closer by his hair and he’s breathless, he leans up on your throne and sits at your feet and he looks so fucking _beautiful_ kneeling at your feet like that, wet with sweat and slurry and waiting on you and it is _good to be king._  

It takes you by surprise for a second when you come—his wandering touches glance on something that makes your breath slam out of you like a blow and _finally_ you’re done, a long _ahhhh_ like a moan in every bit of you.  You drag him up by the hair as your hand clenches tight and cut off his cry with your mouth, grind on his shaking body as you come and he laughs into your shoulder and goes _haha, gross_ but presses down so you can wring the pleasure out as long as it’ll last. 

And then the two of you just slump there and breathe hard and feel good.

“… _Fuuuuuck,_ ” says Gamzee, muffled off in your shoulder.  “ _Goddamn I’m purple all over._ ”

You laugh, and feeling his weight on your thorax as you laugh makes you laugh harder and everything’s warm and good.  This is how it should motherfucking be. 

“Suits you,” you tell him, and he nods in full agreement.  “Goddamn.”  There’s still little twitches going on all through you.  “God _damn_.”

“Mm.”  Gamzee chews absently at your collarbone.  Groans and flops his head back down.  “… _tired now._ ”

“Should go to ablutions,” you say, and don’t even try to move.  Gamzee doesn’t even answer—you’re pretty sure he’s making a good shot at fallin’ asleep.  Goddammit you can’t just fall asleep, not least of all with the two of you ass-naked in your throne.  The door’s shut and nobody’s gonna even poke a horn in without your say-so, but it’s still not the most safest of places.  You click your fangs on Gamzee’s horn and jostle him up a little and he grumbles.  “Little brother,” you say, and get more complaint noises in returning.  “—Gamzee.  Gamzee.  _Gamzee._   You hear about the rustblood, accidentally glued his hands to his horns?”

“ _Kurloz,”_ he groans, and rouses enough to open an eye to look up at you.  “ _That one ain’t even funny._ ” 

It ain’t either, it’s the one they use in schoolfeeding as _jokes you shouldn’t even tell because you oughta get culled without trial for tellin’ that kind of shit, goddamn._   Great truth of the motherfuckin’ universe.  Had a wader come in once, sweeps on sweeps ago, and discover that shit all on his own once, and you honored his proficiency by culling him without fuckin’ trial as you been taught.  Told one of the Great Unfunny Jokes and him untrained and all. 

You ain’t gonna embarrass yourself sayin’ the rest of it out loud, but the joke of the bad joke has roused him a little bit and he wobbles up off you and struggles to get on his feet, grinnin’.  You take a couple breaths and get up too, all wobbly at the knees.

You both look at your throne.

It takes ten minutes’ fucking around with your modus, and you end up with a bucket covered in slurry instead of full of it all neat and shit like you’d wanted, but in the end there’s no big wet spots on your throne and it’ll have to do.  You slide out through the side door leads off to your respiteblock, ready for tomorrow night and what’s coming down.

-

Next night you come out of Kurloz’s room and don’t give a fuck who sees you, for the first time ever.  It’s a weird-ass thing.  Feels like the ship should be different, like your brothers and sisters and all your kin on board should be looking on you different, all knowing and all inside your pan in a way as wasn’t there before.  But for real, everybody just treats you the way they did before.

Almost. 

The first thing to happen to you is when some new little wriggler you haven't ever met before comes running up to you while you head in for a totally badass rap battle a couple sisters are having to hash out some twisted pitch they got beween them un-claimed—you’re hoping for a couple real spades going on at least in the end, maybe even some make-outs.  Best of entertainment. 

But he don’t go in with you. You look down on him from high up where you're at now, and he stares up at you, opens his flap, shuts it again, opens it, and then he just laughs all nervous and excited and runs off again, back to his cohort to whisper. 

You stare after him, but there ain’t no more to look at there and you wanna go in and sit down and ease your sore-ass legs.  You smile at him kinda, head on in and forget about.

The second time somebody makes noise about it, forgetting ain’t so easy. 

She comes find you in interrogation schoolfeed, and the way her face goes scared when you turn around and stand up to as tall as you'll go with the blood all over your hands and the screams dying off behind you, well, it's fucking hilarious.

“Yeah sister?” You go to get your hair out of your face, note your fronds all bloody, and stop yourself.  “What’s up?”

“That’s my question,” she says, and steps up closer at you.  “ _What’s up_ , brother Makara?”

Well shit, she knows your name. 

“Uhh,” you start, and she looks over her shoulders and leans in at you. 

" _What do you motherfucking_ want?" she hisses, and you think you're starting to get a touch of a thought in your pan on what's all going down.  You don't like it.  "I want to know what you're planning."

"Why?" you ask, kinda curious surprised because hell, even if you was planning some shit, you don't know why anybody'd throw in on your lot.  "I got all sorts of plans, sister, I don't motherfucking know what one you mean."  Plans like how you're goin' to go see if Karkat can come over soon and how you got a sister from the congregation you preached at the other night who you figure needs some talking at for the easing of her soul and how you figure it's only right as you should find some quadrant-sign for Kurloz now it's official.  For all wearing your color don't mean much on a ship full of your brothers and sisters were all quadrant-token shit is purple as royal purple gets. 

She steps in on your thinking by getting real close to your face and making you bristle up, insides hot, neck all prickling. 

" _I want to figure out whether I should throw in with you,_ " she says, " _\--when it all goes down_."

" _Step.  Back._ " The words come out gritted off and prickling-sharp, warning.  She blinks and then steps back hasty.  You breathe again.  "Ain't no shit going down," you say, a little calmer.  "Nothing as what hasn't all been going down already.  Don't know what this noise you're making at me is about."

She stares at you a long, long time.  Heretic starts whimpering—you slam it in the thinkpan so it goes still and shuts up and cross your bloody fronds and try to not look away from her stare, for all it’s tryin’ to go through your oculars and out the other side of you. 

“…well,” she says.  “…when you’re ready to talk…find me.”

And then she turns around and walks away.

Times after that come every once in a night or so, and they’re fast and over quick.  You say only what’s true, _yeah,_ and _my matesprit_ and _you can ask him if you don’t believe me,_ and it spreads.  It _spreads._   There are eyes as look on you unfriendly sometimes now, _well we’d all like to get ahead but using our lordship like that_ —and you end up raising your voice to some of them, you say right out loud and to their faces what you think of that and tell them in full and holy strength where they can shove their goddamn whispers.  You slam with a couple of them and you hint at darker things, painful things and watch them falter and lose their flow and Kurloz laughs when you tell him the story during the passing time you got together before you go to ‘coon, bites your lips and laughs. 

And then it stops being funny.

It’s day and you’re setting back to your room for the day through empty halls, listening good and peaceful at the distant laughs and honking far away in the metal mazes you get your walk on through, and you got your eyes so close to shut you don’t even notice the troll standing outside the door of your block until you’ve just about run into him.

It’s—

Oh.  Well shit.

“Feeder Travye,” you say, and bow your head down all respectful-like, down on to one side so’s your horns ain’t a threat.  You had Travye telling you sermons time and over again over the sweeps you been here, always quoting from Kurloz, from talks he’d had on the scriptures with him and what he ordained right in past, what the church has been in battle and service.  Reason you first started to feel in your pusher when you saw Kurloz around the ship, hearing those things he’d said so fine and fierce and holy. 

He nods at you, but he ain’t smiling.  You stand foot to foot and jitter. 

“I have heard things,” he says, and his voice as deep and echoes as strong as it ever did, convicting.  “Talk to me, Makara, of whether there’s truth in them or not.”

Oh.

_Oh._

“Oh,” you say, and you know he knows it from your eyes.  He steps in closer, looks on you sharp and curious like he’s trying to decide what you are.  “I…” but you already decided what you needed to do, what you were _going_ to do.  “…yeah, brother. Red.  Red as—”

But he cuts you off, steps up closer and your pusher tightens up like a knot.

"What are your intentions here, wriggler?"  he says, and even as you wince at his chill and the sudden fear you get that growl turning over in your chest to be let out because you _ain't a wriggler anymore,_ you motherfucking grew up and you deserve some small fucking measure of _respect_ for that now, you deserve to be known as what you are, at the very smallest and least. 

But for all that you're still small and young to him and he leans in and gets a hand in your shirt, pushes you up the wall until the choke of your shirt pulls at your squawkblister and cuts off air and your feet wave for the ground and don't find it.  By the second you figure for what he’s doin’, you’re up off your feet, you’re pressed up on a level with his eyes.  They’re all cold on the insides and he hisses at you like an _enemy_ and how the fuck is this right, how can your own family get salty with you over this—?  " _What do you want out of this?_ "

“ _I—just—_ ” He’s pushing at your choke with his grip on you, the words can’t come out.  “—brother, _what—_?”

His ganderbulbs fixed on your face, his claws are there at your neck and you could fight but he is old and honored, his arms are strong and you’re scared.  You’re fucking _scared._

“ _Please_ ,” you get out, because fuck, fuck _fuck_ you don’t want to fight him, even if you figured you’d win you don’t ever want to spill blood of your family, you don’t got a thirst on for spilling blood at all unless it’s heretic blood, blasphemous in all but its use for messianic art and his arms are heavy and scarred and when you tug at them his hand don’t move an inch.  “ _—don’t—_ “

" _You want to step back from him._ "

The voice is quiet, real quiet and deep, and you see Feeder Travye's eyes as he feels Kurloz come from the dark behind him, great and huge and silent as a shadow himself.  His paint is smiling.  It is a fearsome understate of the look on his face, the bared teeth, the flashing red growing in his eyes.  He was on his way down to find you in your block and you wish sure as everything holy that he’d found you there, but here you hang pinned up next to your very own door and trying to gasp for air.

The hands that got a hold of your shirt jerk, but don't let go.  Maybe even get a bit tighter, and you slide another couple inches back up the wall, feel the air between your feet and the ground.  You don't _want_ to fucking fight him, you _like_ this motherfucker and he was a good schoolfeeder and Kurloz is pissed off and you could fucking cry.  Except you can’t even fucking breathe, holy shit _holy shit_.  You struggle on his hold a little, gasping, and Kurloz makes a noise you hate to hear, like a growl over a groan of pain.  His eyes go from you to Travye and back.

"...I'm not going to hurt him," schoolfeeder Travye says, and you know at  his voice how he must have known Kurloz lifetimes longer than you, he's in good standing there and Kurloz won't want a fight any more than you do.  Fuck, fuck _fuck._   You went and fucked up something old and good, you ain't ever going to forgive yourself if you make Kurloz raise hand at his friend, his _family--_ "I'm just...figuring out a motive."

Kurloz hisses through his open teeth, long and low and pissed and Travye winces again, but he don't turn and his hand stays on you, keeps you were you are.  "Don't see how his _motive_ is any motherfucking business of yours."

"You've had wrigglers try this on you before," says Travye, never takin' his eyes from your face, and your pump biscuit shuts off for a second.  "You always had the good sense to shut them down cold before this, Lord Makara, before they could demand whatever it was they wanted to wheedle out of you--"

"Wouldn't--" you get out, but your air's all wheezing and tied up tight and it's a croak like a motherfucking croakbeast.  "I-- _wouldn't_ \--not a--"

" _Feeder Travye_ ," says Kurloz, and it's a warning, that great, low boom in his thorax and even now it makes you shiver, squeezes your eyes shut at the glory of it.  "If you _hurt_ him I swear to everything I hold holy, I will _hurt you back._ "

“Kurloz,” Travye says, and the name from him sounds like a punch in the guts.  You never heard anybody but the empress call him by his name, for all there have to be some who  know it, you know there must be— “You find this… _wriggler_ in good standing with you, in _hearts_ even?  _Him_?”  And the disgust in his voice cuts at you, he doesn’t think you fucking _worthy_.  “Brother, there are far better for—”

“You _presume_ ,” says Kurloz, and he takes another forward step, his teeth are all bared.  “Sweeps on sweeps since I trusted you with that name, and you _use it to speak on my quadrants!_   Are you my goddamn lusus, _Halore_?  Do you _order my pity_?!”

And just then do you see the look on the face of the troll who’s hand is at your throat, and you fucking well _understand._

There’s been brothers and sisters dared to pity your best beloved a long time before you were hatched.  You thought, but didn’t imagine.  You knew but you get it and now it’s got you, got you hard and tight by the pusher and the throat both the same.

“… _you deserve better_ ,” says Halore Travye, and lets you go.

You hit the ground hard on your knees and suck in air, blessing the messiahs for what you always only ever took for granted before this second.  Kurloz goes past Travye like he ain't there and comes to you in quick steps, helps you up and puts his big fingers at your choke, feeling the places you couldn't breathe.  Looking you over like he thinks he'll find a wound, like you could fall over and fucking die any second here.  You almost laugh at all his worry and care and you look up at him and give him a grin because you're _so fucking glad_ he's here and he needs to know that.

You don't figure out for a second why his face does what it does then, why his breath catches back in him and his lips bare up all his fangs.  But then he holds your cheek in one hand and his thumb touches at the corner of your eye, and you notice the wet sting of your ganderbulbs and feel wet and cool makin' a little line down your face.  Tears.  You're cryin'?  When did you start?

"Kurloz," you say, really quiet but really fucking urgent, and he's starting to breathe deeper, his whole thorax in every breath, there's real true red in his eyes now.  "Hey come on, brother I'm fine--"

"You," starts Travye, but you look past Kurloz at him and shake your head and maybe he sees the look in your eyes and knows it for true because he shuts up, starts to back away.  You nod at him all fast and he holds his ground another second before he takes to his fucking heels and leaves you. 

Kurloz feels him go, you know it by the way he tenses up and starts to turn after, by how his teeth draw apart and that snake-tongue _hsssss_ rattles out from his throat again, and you grab his arms and haul him back as hard as you can.  It's like lifting a fucking _planet_ , he don't want to turn back to you.  He wants to go after Travye, _hurt_ him.

"Kurloz," you say again, and it draws his eyes back to you a little but he's still hissing and he don't seem to see your face.  "Brother you don't wanna hurt him.  Just lookin' out for you is all, he was just--"

" _How does he fucking dare,_ " he snarls, and he grabs you back, one big hand around your arm and squeezing so tight it bruises.  The noise that comes outta you ain't nearly a gasp so much as a groan.  " _I'm gonna_ break his fucking horns," he says, and it lights up his eyes scarlet with every word, the thought of it, of the pain, " _I'm--break--I'm gonna fucking--_ "

"No!" he'll hate himself for that, he'll fucking _loathe_ the hands he used to hurt his family and that's un-goddamn-bearable, you can't let him-- "--Kurloz if you gotta break someone, break somebody as wants it, come on--"

" _I'll kill you,_ " he growls, and you can't tell if it's a promise or one last spark of him showing through, a warning.  You been there before, so close to the edge, so close you can't barely hear but the blood in your ears and the sound of your own self drawing up taut, he wants to _hurt._   " _I'll fucking_ kill YOU--"

"Nah," you say, and you're as sure of that as your own name.  "You won't." 

And then you smile at him, and without a word to warn you, he lets go.

The firsthit lands hard in your side and it ain't a careful slap to sting at you.  It's a punch meant to break things and the ache of it slams up to your horns, buckles you to one side on a wash of glory and pain.  Your new thorax creaks under his strength but nothing snaps and he doesn't give you a time to rest before he grabs you by the arms and digs his claws in hard, careless and vicious like he doesn't ever let himself be at you.  There's a hot, sharp _burn_ and you gasp out praise of it in a snatched breath as blood goes down your arms.  " _Go on,"_ you hear yourself say, and it don't sound like your voice, all rough and deeper and strange, challenging him, drawing his anger to you and away from the family, _"Go on, do your motherfucking_ worst, _let it out-_ -"

Kurloz _roars_ and snatches you full up off the ground, tears at your shirt with his claws and sinks his teeth down into your shoulder so deep you feel him hit bone.  You get your other arm on his shoulders, the one with your sign and his carved in in scars, and hold on him as he pulls his bloody fangs free and sinks them in again, again, _again,_ a new jolt every time until you've got your legs around him too and your head back and your voice loud and full and thankful.  Your shoulder is blood and pain and it's a _mess_ and he's got your blood down his chin and over his lips and you grab him harder than you mean and pull him in as he snarls to lick it away.  His teeth find your lip and _tear_ and you don't lose flesh but you sure as fuck lose skin.  His claws are working at you the whole time, not stopping, tearing down your sides, up your back, the wall and the floor are sticky and purple and you grind up against him and gasp when his claws make fire-lines across your ass, over your thighs, find the softer backs of your knees and dig in so deep you feel your feet jerk and your body thrash. 

Can't last more than five minutes, all that blind rage with nowhere to go but you, but it's a glorious fucking eternity.  No subtlety, no care, just brutality and _pain_ , so much fucking pain, your clothes are shredded rags and your blood paints the metal and his hands and his face down to his chest.  You’re pinned up tight against the wall when he starts to still, your breath’s got these little noises in with it and you fucking swear because you were _right there_ on the edge and now the moment’s gone.

 "...Gamzee," he says, and it's like he only just recognized you, like he just woke up and his voice sounds strange and small.  "--Gamzee.  _Gamzee._ "

Sure as fuck that's you.  You roll up against him, and every bit of you hurts from the moving.  Every move you make's going to be torture for days and you're shivering just thinking on it, on the pain of his claws like a silent reminder every minute.  He makes a noise like a groan and a gasp when you grind on him--

\--and pulls back. 

You lose your grip on him and fall back hard against the wall, all your air knocking out of your thorax with the heavy _thud_ of bone on steel.  Your blood makes it slick and cool and you slide down, weak at the legs and bloody and you were so fucking _close_ , is he not gonna let you come this time because if that's so you think you'd fucking scream--

Kurloz is staring at you like he ain't ever seen you before in his life.  As you look up at him he flinches from your eyes, stares at his bloody hands, the flesh and blood on his claws and soaking clammy in his royal rags, this great, dark stain.  You forget about your bulge (mostly) for a sec and start to try at getting up.  Your legs are so fuckin' weak, they always get that way when you get that close and pull back and your voice is a tight little whine from screaming and yelling and getting punched in the gut like that.

" _Hey_ ," you say, and he winces back from your hand like you'll burn him if you touch him.  " _\--wh--_?"

“Fuck,” he says, and he backs away from you, stares at you and his hands and back at you.  “ _Fuck_ , fuck, shit no FUCK—“

He turns his back on you and he walks away, and there’s a haste to his walking, a roughness to his step as is usually so motherfucking silent that tells you if he was any but his motherfucking self he would be running.

You drag your clothes back together a bit, give it up as a bad job and just snatch a big coat out to knot around you at the hips and cover up your torn-ass pants.  It’s a focus and hardship, but you get your pan all gathered up together and you let a fear and darkness out of you, a sing-song in your horns and down and up your motherfuckin’ back-bones.  Whoever’s in these halls now, they’ll know there’s kin out there is pissed and dangerous, and you just gotta hope they’ll get the fuck out of your way.

You put a hand on the burn of pain in your shoulder and run after.

By the time you catch him he’s headed up to the doors of his throneroom and goin’ faster, shaking his head, sayin’ to himself too soft for you to get your listen on of.  You grab out at his arm, and it’s all sticky and purple-bloody and he winces away and growls a warning you totally fucking ignore.

“Kurloz, hey,” you say, and he growls louder at you.  You grit up your fangs and don’t go growling back now, not when he’s pissed.  “What the fuck?”

He pulls his arm away from you all sharp.

“ _You ain’t got the sense you were spawned with_ ,” he hisses, and tries to go storming off through his big doors and leave you behind back there.  You catch the door as he tries to swing it shut, and it’s maybe a surprise to him as much as to you when you hold off his trying to close it long enough to shove through to the other side with him.  He’s breathing like he really did run down here, his claws all twitchy and tense-loose-tense next to his sides. 

“Out,” he says.

“No.”

You frown at each other, and for all your pan tells you you’re still smaller, you ain’t nearly as small as you expect.  You stand up as big as you can and pull your lips back away off your fangs a little bit so he knows you’re pissed. 

“I was _this fuckin’ close_ ,” you say, and before he can jump on you for bein’ a selfish-ass wriggler, go on over top of him. (Ain’t gonna ask about what got you here, not gonna ask about _trusted you with that name_ and times long gone by, goddammit you have _faith_ , you’ve always found it in your pusher to have faith in what’s goddamn important). “—what’s got in your pan all sudden, got you like this, you were right fuckin’ there with me and then you just—”

“I wasn’t _right there with you_ ,” he growls, and you wonder at it, if you could make that sound too.  If that rumble could thunder out in your thorax too if you tried.  “I wasn’t there at-fucking- _all_ , Gamzee!  Goddammit, there’s two places should be open to you when you stand in front of one of us in holy rage, _two_ , you mind, you _shoosh_ and pray to all messiahs you’re serendipity-made, or you fucking _run_.  You don’t stand there and open your neck for their fangs!  You don’t tell them _do it_!”

The hot moment drags its claws through your pan, saying those words to him with his eyes all red and burning, and your hackles are right up before you take time for a thought, your horns come down and your shoulders square up.  You felt that moment in soul and pusher, you fucking _meant it_ and here’s him _yelling at you for it_?  Fuck that noise!

“You got _fuck-all mad_ and beat the shit out of me,” you growl, and it is a growl, and if you take your tone from him then that’s a proof of your blood, of the link you got stretched out between the two of you.  “And I _loved it_ , you know I did, you got that shit out the system and I got a brother’s claws in deep, why are you—”

"I could have fucking KILLED YOU!" the words echo out across the room, exploding out of him like planets blowing, like  bounce and come back so loud your ears pin back at the ringing in them.  "I could have _ripped you limb from limb!_   I could have tore your throat out with my fucking _teeth_ and not woke up till you were bleeding out, goddammit--goddammit, Messiahs fucking forgive me--" he rakes his fingers through the spikes of his hair between his horns and winces when it catches, drags rough and painful at his skin--does it again, _again_ \--

"Stop it!" God you're going to be sick.  Angry heat goes hot in your blood and sick cold fights it in your guts and you're gonna just puke.  "Fuck, if I'd figured you'd get salty at _me_ for bailing your sorry ass out of hurting somebody when you were outta your head I'd have just let you tear old Travye's head off!" The core of you howls hurting and tugs at you _stop it you idiot stop it stop stop stop_ but you're so fucking _angry_ and there's new parts of your pan now, parts that growl before they cringe and care less for gentle words and more for claws.  Your heart is a snarl.  "You wouldn't do that shit to me, okay, I fucking _trust you!_ "

" _You put your faith in troll hearts,_ " he hisses, hate and despair, and you taste sea-salt and ashes and fear.  "You trust in us but you _shouldn't,_ Gamzee, trolls fucking _fail!_   Trolls fuck up and kill and die _all the goddamn time, you stupid_ _PAN-DEAD_ BRAT!"

" _You said you pitied me_ ," you snarl out, and it's the only time you ever been glad to see the shock and hurt hit his face, the way he jerks back away from you.  "I _trusted in that_ , you saying it was a lie now?  I said motherfucking _yes_ and you did what you wanted and _THAT'S THE MOTHERFUCKING TRUTH_ and if you wanted and I wanted, the fuck's wrong with it?!"

"I could.  _Have.  KILLED YOU_." He grits out the words like claws down stone, and if you cared in this second you'd get a note on of how his voice has lowered down, how _angry is loud, hurting is soft_ but you don't fucking _care._   He should fucking hurt, you didn't do _shit-all_ wrong and he's treatin' you like a wriggler who can't choose what he wants!  You _got what you wanted._   So did he, what the FUCK-- "I am not the goddamn _tool of your destruction,_ you stubborn-ass pan-leak!  You _WILL NOT DO THAT AGAIN!_ "

"You don't fucking OWN ME!" You howl back at him, and fury drives you up and to him, he's solid and strong and cold when you get a fist tight in the front of his shirt but when you pull with all the strength you got in you he bends and doubles, and you're _strong enough,_ you're OLD ENOUGH.  You spit it in his face, quiet like knives. "You don't own me and I don't _make my choices by your say._ "

"You arrogant piece of _shit,_ " he hisses, and the spite in his voice burns at you.  He straightens his back up and swats your hand off him and he is so much taller than you and your back is a prickle of fear and your face is a burn of anger and he looks at you like you're less than nothing.  "I am your goddamn KING!  _Grand Highblood_.  That name is still on my shoulders, that _power_ is still _mine._ "

Goddammit god _dammit_ your squawkblister is twisted up tight and you got a burning under your skin and in your oculars and you ain't gonna cry, it's not happening--but his eyes are so goddamn cold and you don't know the look on his face. 

"...and that's the measure of it, huh?" you say, and you keep the squeezed stupid dumb-ass sob out of your voice but you can't stop it shaking like your hands are.  "--that's all in the end, in the end your pity's only worth till I fuck up."

You hurt him again, you hurt him sure as a knife in the thorax.  For a second your eyes lock on each other and you're both hurting and tired and angry as fuck, you just want to go to him and you can see he wants the same.

Then his eyes close and flick open again, and they're cold and old and flat like stones. 

"Get out."

"I'm not motherfucking _done_ t--"

" _Get OUT!_ "  And when he grabs you like you had him, when he pulls, your feet lift off the ground and you're hanging from the strength of him, kicking and breathless-scared.  You've been this close before, you've kissed him from here and pulled yourself closer, but this time all you can imagine is how his fangs would rip out your throat.  ( _don't want to die you don't want to_ die)  " _Before I_ throw _you out._ "

He drops you. 

You run.

-

Your name is Kurloz Makara, and your block is trashed. 

You didn't mean to destroy every fucking thing, you came here to _calm the fuck down_.  But you caught him by a horn in that corner one night and ( _he growled in your face and spat out heinous_ untruthful--) he smiled and kissed you again before he had to go and your claws have torn that memory away until your claws bled and the wall was smeared and bent and scarred.  You bent him back up against the edge of your 'coon and ( _he looked at you with eyes full of hurt and called your pity something petty, something so_ easily breakable--) he made soft sounds and purred for you, never took his eyes off yours and you've ripped the chitin to shreds. 

Slime is painted across the floor and it reminds you of him, how he was broken and how the family's held him up while he got stronger.  Your paints are smashed on the ground and they remind you of him, of moments you snatched while you bled out your new paints.  The door to your ablutions block is smashed down and water is pooling out across the slime and paint and everything reminds you of him and you are so _goddamn ANGRY._   You have to be motherfucking angry.  You have to rage and storm and crush and claw because--

...because not being angry hurts too bad _._  

You've still got his blood on your hands where he let you claw him, where he threw himself into his trust and your pity like it would keep him alive, and it makes a hard, awful knot close up in your thorax the like you haven't felt in hundreds of sweeps. You try to unravel it, think on what's causing it and let it go again, and thoughts nag at you like claws in your skin, _where is he now_ and _did it just end are we over_ and the hardest and hottest pain, _is he crying, now_? and the knowing that he most surely fucking is is what sends you moving again, tearing papers to shreds, wild and hating. 

You don't know how long you spend in there.  You slump in the rest of your slime and fall asleep that way, but all your dreams are the fight, over and over again, the look in his eyes when you reminded him your status, your title, the way his voice shook like he was on the edge of tears.  You wake and break and punch the walls until you bleed and pass out and wake up and do it all again, pace your block a hundred times.

You don't know how long you spend in there, but eventually, Meenah is there.

You wake up to her, sitting next to you where you curl in the curdled slime.   You go for her the second you see her, roar and try to get your claws in her.  She catches your wrists so fast you don't see her move and locks you there, strength to strength.

You ain't ever been as strong as her.  She pushes you down and back and tugs hard and you buckle to one side, down onto your knees.  You don't want to _kneel_ to her you want to fucking _kill_ her and her stupid calm face and her perfect paint and all her gold rings when everything is fucking ruined and you can't do a thing to fix it.

"Kurloz."

 _(Kurloz..._ )

" _Don't call me that._ "

"Kurloz." She shakes her head.  "Little Kurloz Makara.  Little anglerfish."

Something awful twists up again in your, strong and hard enough to squeeze a noise out of you, a strangled sound. 

" _Stop it._ "

"You broken enough of your shit now," she says, and her grip on your shifts around, her thumbs are pressed up into the palms of your hands and moving back and forth and you want to tear her open, you want to _tear yourself open_.  "Time to stop runnin' away and deal, bayb.  Time to face up to it."

You thrash against her grip and she shifts a little, but not enough to lose her grip and she purses her lips and squeezes until you jerk at the pain, grinding your bones together. 

"Little Kurloz Makara," she says again, and your thinkpan aches and you can't find it in you to keep struggling.  "You wanna tell me what happened now?"

"... _I fucked up_ ," you say, and just forcing the words drags through you like hooks tearing your flesh.  Your voice is all hoarse from screaming and growling and nothing else and you gotta swallow hard on the words.  Still do your words come choked and small.  "... _he motherfucking hates me._ "

"Yeah right," she scoffs, and it burns at you, makes your pan ache.  "Your buoy thinks you hung the moon and starfish, you're just bein' overdra--"

"I'm not making shit up, Meenah!" your voice rises without your meaning, gets edges on it and coldness to it.  "He said as much to my face, ' _you said you pitied me',_ he says, like I don't--like--and ' _you don't own me'_ , goddammit I never owned him, I didn't--I never--"

Meenah clicks her tongue like she's thinking and it shakes you a little, enough you shut your stupid trap and just lean your head forward and breathe.  Your ganderbulbs burn and your seeing swims around.  You're so fucking tired, and angry and torn right the fuck up and scared he won't come back to you and scared you don't deserve for him to. 

"...okay," she says finally, and drops your hands.  Keeps her arms spread out to you.  "Clam here."

You sit up away from her, jolted up and down you at the sudden freedom and the order, and she sighs.  "...no, don't pull that hoofbeast ship," she says, and beckons for you and you're weak and fucking stupid and your whole body sways to her, betrays just how fucking bad you want to do what she orders.  "C'mere.  Come on."

And then she gets her hand on you and just like that, you're lost.  She has you, she can pull you in close and you don't even try to fight it, just slump over to her.  Plant your face in her shoulder and the soft dark of her hair and feel her hands burrow under your hair too, find the back of your neck and rub over it all cool.  

"You are an obnoctopus piece of flotsam," she tells you, and rubs at your worn-out chipped-up horns just hard enough it almost aches your thinkpan at the cold press of it.  Feels good.  Feels more than good.  "...but he don't fuckin' _hate you_ , you idiot.  You ever even _had_ a fight like this before?"

"... _no,_ " you say in her shoulder.

"Ever even had a real matesprit to fight with?"

"... _fuck you._ "

"Yeah, 's what I thought." She pats your head, and it helps.  Which is fucking stupid, why should it, but it does, and there's no point fighting that.  "Angler, you gotta ride out waves like this.  Shit don't last forever, you know that.  Remember when I called you a spineless salt-sucking slime-worm?"

Sounds familiar, but you got a lot of life for it to sound familiar from and you can't figure when it happened or why.  You been at each other's throats for so long.

"No."

She laughs.  "Sea?  And you didn't talk to me for a sweep and a half over that fight and now you don't even remember it!  It'll blow over, _little one._   Listen to somebody who's been around efin longer than you."

You growl a little bit, but there’s a hot hard truth in her that’s melting through you, tearing up the knot that’s been closed up in your thorax since the fight.  Her hands are still on your hair.  You are so goddamn pale for her you can’t motherfucking breathe and you hate it and you hate her and you lean in her hands and let out a sigh that edges on a purr.

“ _Yeah,_ ” she says, and leans your head forward into her lap to mess with your hair.  “Yeah, there you go.  You can’t ever do shit unless you all clammed down.  Gotta sink about this shit good and careful.  Now.”  She gives your horns a good hard squeeze, makes your insides draw up tight and then let loose again like a great big sigh.  She takes her hands back away, lets go and sits up.  “Come on.  Silt up strait.  Get your paint fixed up.  You’re gonna take care of this shit.  _Today_ , mothaglubber.”

Makes your back thrill down with fear, just thinking on it. 

“He’ll not forgive me for this,” you warn, and she rolls her eyes. 

“I think you getting’ way the shell too searious aboat this,” she says.  “He is _so codclam flushed at you,_ anglerfish, if you two talk this shit out straight he’ll chum back to you so fast, you got no clue.”

Sure, so she says.  But you ain’t got it in you to fight her on this, ain’t no fighting Meenah when she gives an order.  You slump.

“…sure,” you say, more to get her off your back than for truth’s sake.   She seems to notice you ain’t convinced; she tugs at your hair—the pain snaps at your pan where it already hurts, sets the ache back to kindling behind your eyes. 

"All I'm sprayin' is, you's _littorally_ ten times older than him," she says, and frowns at you.  "You know storms blow on, but he don't.  Bet he thinks you're gone for good.  You thought about that?"

-

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you have motherfucking ruined everything.

You lie there next to your ‘coon and stare in through one of the little clear window-holes at the green in front of you and pumpbeat by second by minute by hour you hold off putting that shit down your chute until you choke on it, until everything is the pulse and haze of green in your thinkpan and you ain’t got Kurloz’s face in front of your eyes yellin’ _YOU WILL NOT DO THAT AGAIN_ and cold, _I am your goddamn_ king!

The thought sets you whimpering again and you hold onto your own self like you’re dying of cold, curl up in and drop down in silent hating of you, in dark fog in your pan where you could fucking care less if you lie there till prophesied end-times.  Your pan goes to dark places again, and the family you put ever piece of your believing in, the family as saved you from the heat and the stink and the pain unwanted, becomes feeder Travye’s face as he dropped you, _he doesn’t deserve you_.  The matesprit you pitied and trusted so fierce and true becomes a stone god, all far-off and distant and over you like a mountain, blocking out your light, _your king your king_ the Grand Highblood _I am your_ king, _arrogant piece of shit—_

And then you hear the door open.

Some part of you sends your skin burning, your fronds weapon-grasping, your ganderbulbs wide—but even that gets only so far as to make you twitch, down your arms and your legs and then gone again into the cold fog that owns you and weighs on you hundredfold.

“…you’re not even going to get up, are you?” says a voice, and you close your eyes and try to remember why that voice is makin’ you want to cry so bad.

Karkat turns on the light and you groan and curl up like a scuttlebeast under a turned-over behemoth corpse.  He don’t pause for concern, just comes marching over with little clicks from his shiny-ass boots and pushes you with one of those boots until you have to look up out at him from under your arm. 

“ _Go away,_ ” you say, and your voice is all tiny and scratched up. 

“The fuck I will.” He drops down beside you—grabs you by the horns and _tugs_ and you come up squalling at the wrench of it, wide awoken and pissed.  Karkat lets go, crosses his arms up tight in front of him, and waits.

“Fuck _off_.”

“When has you making the _scary face_ ever worked on me, bulge-sucker?”  Karkat don’t move an inch and you hate him for it, hate him in your guts where you hate yourself and love him hard with every other piece of you.  “Now, why haven’t you been out of your room in two straight nights?  _And_ …” he holds up a frond before you can start.  “…why is your matesprit—the _grand highblood_ , thanks, you may have heard of him, it’s kind of important to the empire he does his goddamn JOB—why has nobody seen him for _exactly the same amount of time_?  You have a minute.  Explain this bullshit.”

…you do.  You do in big, gulping breaths and angry snarls and fast talking that gets you no-fucking-where and you’re up on your feet, back and forth, back and forth, all the energy you ain’t been using this whole time coiled up in your and jittering in your legs so you can’t hardly walk straight.  Karkat watches and listens, and his mouth falls a little bit open with every fuckin’ word.

“—hurt him and I kept talking even though I motherfuckin’ _knew_ and I kept on doin’ it like it wasn’t a thing, _you don’t own me_ I said and he _doesn’t_ , brother he never didn’t ever want to, not ever and I said that shit anyway I asked him _is that all your pity’s worth_ I—fuckin’—oh god, _god—_ “  You drag your hands at your face, your hair—and remember him doing the same, the way he punished himself for bein’ careless with you, and your pusher shatters into little pieces again, all rage and fearing.  “—I fucked it up,” you say, the words that you’ve been listening at up in your pan ever since the fight like a whip coming on down over and over.  “ _I fucked it up_ I fucked it up I fucked it up I fucked—”

“Shhhhh.”  Karkat’s up on his feet now too and his hands catch you, pull your claws down away from yourself and turn them from your own flesh.  “Shhh, sh-shhh, Gamzee.  You’re getting hysterical, globes-for-brains, calm down.  Calm down, _shhhh_ …”

“ _I fucked it up,_ best friend,” you tell him again, because if he can still tell at you _shoosh_ like that and want you calmed down, well, he must not get his understand on of how your land and heavens are crashing together, how they got you crushed between.  “I ruined it, I fuckin’ _broke_ what I can’t fix—”

"Gamzee."  Karkat gets your face in his hands and holds you, not with strength but the goddamn warmth of him, not with a growl but the red of his eyes, and you freeze.  “Gamzee,” he says again, and leans up, pulls you down to press your thinkpans together so you feel his breathing on you like hot wind.  "…you _idiot._ "

And that's fucking it, that's all it takes, whatever's knotted up like a cold-ass rock inside breaks up and you make a great big howling sound you didn't know you could make right from the pit of your thorax and pull him up against you like a comfort toy and bawl in his shoulder. 

He pets your hair and your horns through it, and that’s a small comfort but a comfort it remains.  You tell him god knows what, about the things _he_ said to the things you said and how you _trusted_ him and he called you a pan-dead brat, how he drew himself up and told you cold that you were back-talking your king.  He holds you tighter and tighter and shooshes into your hair and it hurts like chopping off a rotten limb, hurts like prayer and confession. 

“ _—and now he motherfuckin’ hates me,_ ” you finish into his shirt, and the misery on that though hits you so hard you just make a keen and cry and bury your face back in his hot little thorax. 

“…okay,” says Karkat, real slow, and his hands never stop in your hair and around your horns.  “Okay.  Fuck, wow.  Uh…well first of all— _shoosh_.” He puts a little kiss on the top of your nugbone and squeezes you up against him and you hiccup all wet and gross and try to fucking shoosh.  Shit ain’t easy.  “You have to calm the fuck down about this.  Think about it logically.  How did you make up last time you had a fight?”

Last time?

“…ain’t got a ‘last time’,” you mumble, and sniff.  You feel gross and swelled up and wet.  Your pan hurts. 

“What do you mean, ‘no last time’?”  Karkat’s got a frown in his voice.  “—what, did—oh.  Fuck.”  He sounds like he just figured some shit out.  You don’t give a shit what he just figured out unless it gets you back what you fucked up and lost and besides it makes his hand stop touching your horns, which ain’t okay.  You press up at them and makes a miserable noise.  He doesn’t move.  “…Gamzee,” he says, “…is this, like…is this actually the _first time_ you’ve had a fight with him?”

You don’t gotta nod because he does that thing where he reads it right the fuck off of your face.

“… _oh_ ,” he says, and sighs a great long sigh.  “…no wonder you’re so fucked up about it.  Okay, listen to me.  _Listen_ to me.  Sit up.  Gamzee I swear to god.”

You don’t wanna sit up, you want to hold on to him and have him pet your hair.  You hold on as he pries at you and he finally gets you to let go, growling because you don’t fuckin’ wanna. 

“You said shit you regret,” Karkat says, and you nods so hard you just about hurt yourself.  “I’ll bet he said some shit he regrets too.  You…” and his precious face goes a little bit red up the cheeks.  “…you say stuff you don’t really want to say, when you’re pissed off,” he says, eyes off on the other wall instead of on you.  “You say shit you regret, okay?  And then you just have to make up for it.  I bet he’s as fucked up about this as you are.”

You shake your head some more, sniff and wipe at your nose with one hand—Karkat grabs your hand, pulls a piece of clean cloth out his sylladex, scrubs your wrist and then your face.  Your paint comes off all patchy where you been crying and you feel ugly as fuck, which ain’t something you ever needed a consciousness of before you got sober.  Goddamn but sometimes you still miss wrappin’ yourself up with that burn and numb, that way it would make your insides a blur and your pan would just lose whatever bad thing happened, just let it slip away into nothing.

“Don’t shake your head at me,” Karkat says.  “He’s upset about it.  You were just wailing at me about how you hurt him, how you could see that you hurt him.  Don’t even fucking deny it.”

“Because _I fuckin’ hurt him_ ,” you start, but he puts his hand over your mouth.

“And he pulled the Grand Highblood card on you,” he says, and you whine in his hand because _yeah_ , thanks, you fuckin’ _remember._   “Gamzee, I hate that gigantic slimy piece of carrion, alright?  But when it comes to you he’s…not…” he chews on his lip, and if you were better framed of your own mind you would appreciate his trying to find kinder words for your matesprit than he is obliged to find regular-like. 

“…he actually isn’t…a terrible person,” he says finally.  “—when it comes to you.  He’ll feel shitty about saying what he said, I would bet you a thousand caegar.”

You think, just for a second, you think on things you ain’t been allowing yourself to remember, about how Kurloz held you when he fucked you up by bein’ too kind and how never a single one time has he forgot to hold you and tell you _good, so good_ when he’s done with you and about just lyin’ with him and tellin’ jokes and you make another noise you wouldn’t credit to yourself, long drawing-out keen of what’s hurting you inside.  Karkat pets your hair.

“You have to go talk to him,” he says, and your inside bits go cold and hard of fear.  “Soon.  Today.”

“ _Can’t_ ,” you say, and it’s a cold truth, a stone fact.  “Best friend I can’t, I—”

“You’re scared.”

You nod your coward head and send a prayer for your weakness, a thanks for Karkat for all he would hate to know you been prayin’ for him even to just thank the messiahs for him bein’ here at all.  More tears gang up at the corners of your eyes, your throat locks itself off from you. 

“… _I’m scared,_ ” you say back to him, and the noise of it is goddamn painful, goes rolling off your tongue like a mouth full of hot iron.

‘ _Shhhhi,”_ says Karkat, and turns your face to him.  “The first two words are really easy, Gamzee, you won’t even have to think about them, you just stare at your feet like you always do and you say—”

-

“—I’m sorry.”

The words make a little jolt go through you all from your nubbones up to your thinkpan.  Makes your teeth bare. 

“Just a suggestion, angler,” she says, all mild.  “You gotta at least reelize, you hurt him in ways you can’t fix with stitches.  And he’ll say sorry back, over and over again if I know our little Makara.  You just say _‘I’m sorry_ ’, because no matter what the shell he did that got you so glubbed up, what you went and said after was _stupid as fuck_.”

“But—”

“Stop bein’ prowd and _listen_!”  She grabs your horn and rattles you around.  “He shouldn’t’a done what he did, okay, school, I get that.  But then you got _scared._   And _he_ got scared.  And you got pissed and he got pissed, you see what I’m glubbin’ to you?  He’ll say sorry, but if he can’t get the words out you gotta take respawnsibility, ya dig?  Wriggler’s still learnin’ from you.”

_Still learning from you._

You wonder real sudden if Gamzee’s ever even seen a killing rage that didn’t end in a quick shoosh and pap, no blood no harm no goddamn foul.  You’d woken and seen him bloody and pinned under you and remembered…what was her name, you remembered Hennhe’s screams when she woke up in her kismesis’ blood with a handful of his guts, the mourning of brother Rajree for his murdered matesprit, tearing himself apart piece by piece until he was a wreck and ruin, a graveyard of missing parts and the stink of death.  You think of Gamzee’s bright eyes and his faith and his love for his family he hopes with every bit of his young soul they return.  Of how he looked on Travye like just the harsh of his words dug a knife in his pusher. 

“… _god,_ ” you say, and for the first time in days something breaks free in your pan, something flows clear and the spinning hating roar of your thinkpan straightens and _moves_. “Fuck.  _Fuck_.”

“…good,” she says, and smiles a little at you.  “…now…”

-

“Now…” Karkat sits up a little, stretches his arms up in the air.  “…come here.”

You look at him not understanding—he rolls his eyes. 

“You’re _covered in blood_ ,” he says.  “Blood and open wounds, holy shit.  I’m cleaning you up.”  He rolls his sleeves up to his elbows, pulls out warm water and towels and holy shit, bandages and laceration dehiscence preventers for the big open ones and you’re already melting.  “…get naked, you pitiful wreck, I’m going to take care of you until you can’t even fucking move.”

“ _Holy shit_ ,” you say, and he is red right up to his horns but he smiles at you and there’s pure pale in his eyes.  Your voice comes out a moan, you didn’t even credit how bad you needed this.  “ _Fuck_ , yeah best friend, please—”

“Shhh,” he says, and he moves up and into your space and you shiver and let him reach up to his horns.  “…clothes off.”

You get naked for him all obedience, and he smiles and pets your hair and your neck and the places you got clawed, gentle enough it doesn’t barely sting. 

“…these are awful,” he says, and rolls you over a little, looking at the long hurting lines down your back.  Every inch of you is the same beloved to him as any other inch, and his hand on your back slides across the sore aching on your ass and the deep throb across your spine both the same and it’s so nice you get out a touch of a purr for him, for his sweetness and his lovely hands and the way he cares for you so good.  “Seriously, god _damn._   If you weren’t pupated and your chitin plates hadn’t come in so nicely, you’d have actual torn-up muscles.”

“ _Mmm_ ,” you say, and he sighs and gives in, rubs up and down your back for you until you’re purring for real, happy and warm like you haven’t been for days. 

“…does that feel good?” he asks, and when you start to answer one hand slips up to your horn and there’s a wickedness to him, the way he squeezes just as you try to make words. 

 _“Fuck,_ ” you get out, and every inch of you just feels so goddamn _nice_ , not all tight down in one place like mating fondness, not tryin’ to get somewhere like when you gotta come—just _nice_ , so _fucking_ nice you can’t hardly breathe of it.  “ _Fuck_ , Karkat, brother, _please yeah ‘s good, so fuckin’ good—”_

“You shameless moron,” he says, but you can hear his voice do the same inside as you feel, that hot wanting for being close.  You’re burning up sudden and hot and sharp, all that trust with no way out of you but purring and pieces of words, _brother_ and _best friend_ and _palest love_ and _please more_ and he’s going red all across his sweet face for you and you love him.  “—goddamn, Gamzee.  You really did need this, huh?”

“ _Yes,_ ” you breathe out, and he holds you closer against the purr in his chest and pets your hair. 

He holds you there a long time, long enough you’re all dizzy inside and sleepy and limp against him, and then he finally sighs and kisses your smiling lips real soft and pulls back.  You are cold without his miracle warmth, but you ain’t got the pan-power to fight it and you let him lay you out on the ground again and reach back over for the stuff he brought with him for caring on your hurting. 

“Hold still,” he says, and turns you on your side, curled away so he’s got your back to him, putting his fingers to the clawmarks there again.  “I have to get rid of the dirt in these, then I have some stuff to hold them shut and make sure they don’t get infected and then I’m gonna put on some bandages so you don’t tear anything open again.  Okay?”

You don’t hear a thing to argue on, so you just lie there and purr for him, noise bouncing back at you from all the walls around you.  He hums to himself and takes the rag to your back and your purr arcs up loud again, the hot fog that’s inside your skin spins and burns and—

\--and then your nook throbs hot and sharp and you realize what’s happenin’ and jerk away from him so fast you all but fall backward, squeezing your knees real tight together.

“Fuck no, no sorry,” you’re already sayin’, and his eyes are wide and confused and then understanding and his face goes all pink.  His eyes jump down for a second and you squeeze your legs shut and want to fucking die.  “—sorry, sorry, shit _sorry—_ “

“Shhh--!” he reaches out, and when he gets his hands on your hornbeds your muscles don’t do what they’re told.  He lays you down slow and gentle, head against his knees and as your body goes limp you can feel the tip of your bulge out its sheathe and you know he can see and you want to fucking _die_ you want to die because that shit ain’t pale and you’re ruining _every-fucking thing._ “Gamzee.  _Listen to me._   Shh.” 

“ _Sorry,_ ” you say again, and he sighs and leans down over you and you squeeze your eyes shut and your face burns like fire. 

“It’s…okay,” he says.

Your eyes blink and then open wide and you look up at him and see him looking down at you.  And he ain’t staring at your bulge doin’ awful and heretical shit under your very own palemate’s hands, he’s lookin’ at your face and there’s a little smile on his face while he touches your lips and your cheeks and your eyes, pale as sand and stars. 

 “Really,” he says.  “…it’s…it’s seriously okay.  _Shooosh_ , fuck—Gamzee you don’t have to hide from me, I already knew you were a freak.” There’s a smile in his voice down under the nervous, a real actual joke in the words—he pets your face and the pale hits the flush and drowns it out, the ache of wanting dies down again.  You breathe in deep breaths of him and pray and your bulge gets the fuck away from where it’s not wanted and you’re alright again. “ _Shhh,_ shoosh.  I know what pain does to you.  Hell, it’s better than you just suffering the whole time anyway, at least you’re enjoying yourself.”  And he leans down and kisses your horn, right at the base, puts his forehead to yours upside-down and you can hear the smile still linger in him.  “… _Pale for you_.  Never not pale for you.”

You try to answer back and it comes out a sob.  He nods and shooshes and picks up his rag again, starts in on the deep claws across the backs of your legs that make you twitch and whimper at the sting of them.  Once in every while you have to go _stop, stop stop_ , gasping it out when it gets too much, and he don’t say a single word of judgement about what your body does un-pale and heinous heretical—soothes and shooshes until your nook’s throbbing eases and your bulge stops twisting and trying to come out. 

When he starts in on your mauled shoulder you jerk away for real. 

“ _Can’t_ ,” you’re babbling when he gets to you, “—no brother I can’t, it’s—you—” You’re a wreck, and he takes your face in his hands and touches you soft and sweet as sugar, snow, pale as anything and it calms your shaking, breaks you further and further down.  “… _it’ll—gonna hurt so bad brother I can’t I can’t I’ll—_ ”

“Oh, fucking hell,” he says, and he pulls you in closer and closer as you shake, puts your arms around his precious hot-skinned little self and scratches at your horns until you soften and hang on him, breathing harder than you’d have credited yourself.  His voice is hot in your ear.  “ _Gamzee for god’s sake, I know what a bulge looks like.  Hell, if you need to get off because I’m fucking around with your_ biggest goddamn turn-on _, knock yourself out.  It doesn’t make this flushed.  I’m not flushed for you, dumbass, I know you aren’t flushed for me, so stop_ whining _.”_

“But—”

Karkat sighs again.  “…has it occurred to you, nook-licker,” he says, little louder, “…seeing you freaking the fuck out about this is making me…” he stops and winces, and you wonder what his face looks like now.  “…that it’s…that it— _upsets_ me goddammit that’s a dumbass word okay but—stop tearing yourself up about it, dumbass.  It…hurts.”

His rag touches your shoulder again and you go tight in his arms, hiss at the bone-deep burn of it, the noise that comes out is half a sob and half a moan.  “ _Please—_ “

“ _Go ahead,_ ” he murmurs to you, and he changes how he holds you, he grabs your wrist and pulls it slow and gentle down and it’s awful what kinda noise you make when your fingers brush your own sheathe, you’re so ready for a touch, _anything_ , it almost hurts.  “ _Shhh, shshshhh it’s okay, goddammit you’re not fucking anything up, you’re okay, I’m okay, it’s_ okay—”

You fight it for another long second, and then he starts in at your bleeding shoulder again and _oh_ , fuck _oh god…_

He don’t try to make you stop—doesn’t shoosh you out of it, doesn’t touch you to help you along either outside his careful touching at your shoulder, and you’re glad of that because if he tried touchin’ your bulge you’d fucking die, you’d—you—

You don’t know what you’d do, and you don’t have to find out because he just keeps his face by yours as you touch yourself and whispers _you’re doing just fine_ and _almost done_ and _it’s okay, it’s okay_ until he finally pulls away his hand from the broken-up skin and starts to put bandages gentle and slow around the burn of pain, and you think on how you got it and even while your pusher twists in pain you’re sobbing out your matesprit’s name and thrashing up against your moirail, cryin’ out in his hot shoulder. 

It’s a difficult thing, for a second you don’t think you got the pan power left to not splatter him purple, but you find the right spot in your pan and feel everything shift _in_ you, the soft throbbing of filling up inside instead of the emptying ache happens usually.  Karkat notices—kisses your face and rubs your back and tells you _you didn’t have to do that_ and _goddammit where‘s your pail even you know there can be health problems if you leave that in there too long_ and _pale for you pale for you pale for you._

“ _…still…pale…?_ ” is the first thing you croak out, and he rolls his eyes at you, ties off the last bandages and smacks you on the back of the nug.

“Of course we’re still pale, you pile of insecure steaming shit,” he says, and his hands rub big, hot circles on your shaking back, the heave of your thorax, leaves alone the sharp twinge low in your belly where you still need to go get a pail.  “We are pale as _fuck._   We are so pale we put those awful white glowing angel things in _The Big Wriggler’s Book Of Things That Will Kill You_ to goddamn shame because their unholy blinding white glow isn’t as pale as us.  Now shut the fuck up and calm the fuck down and then get up on your scrawny wobbly-ass legs and find a bucket before you hurt yourself retaining that stuff.”

You do what you’re told and he packs up his stuff and goes off to clean his hands while you empty out and leave yourself all shaky and fresh and new.  Goddamn but you feel wrung out like a rag.

Karkat comes back in, pulls you up more on your feet, and holds out clothes at you.  You reach and take, feel the bandages stretch a little around you like Karkat’s hot hands wrapped around everything that hurts, and you have to just do what feels right in you and lean down to pick him up for a hug.  You’ll pay him back another time, you’ll lay him out and touch him all gentle until all that stress and shit is just washed away neat and clean and he’s purring his precious little thunderstorm purr, you’ll bundle him all up in your arms and hold him but right now you are a mess.

Karkat shoves your paints in your hands, and you look down on them and then, real careful, you put them back down.

“…not for this,” you say, and he raises his eyebrows and then shrugs and arches up with his fronds over his head so his back goes _pop-pop-pop-crack_.  “I’m gonna go meet him bare-face, it’s the best of what I can get my offer on of.”

“If it makes you feel better,” he says, and shrugs again.  “Doesn’t matter to me as long as you _get your ass in gear_ and go _talk to him._ ”

“Okay, best friend—”

“Now.”

You cringe a little bit.  Karkat don’t budge a single inch.

“Right now, Gamzee,” he repeats.   “Listen, if you don’t walk right out that door right this second and go talk to him in person about this unbelievable shitstorm of clown idiocy, you’re going to sit here and worry about it instead.  Take a step toward the door.”

You do what you’re told.

“Now another one.”

Another step, and if that’s it, if that’s all you got to think about, you can do that.  If walking’s all that needs doing, you can make yourself get it done.

“Good,” says Karkat.  “Walk.  Find him.  Just start with ‘I’m sorry’.  Go from there.”  He comes up next to you—squeezes your hand and then gives you a little shove toward your own door.  “Get _going_!  Holy shit, do I have to walk beside you the whole way telling you how to walk?  Get your ass in gear, Gamzee, you have things to do.  I’m gonna use your ablutions block while you’re gone.”

And then you’re shoved out the door and it slams behind you.

You get half the way down the hall outside your block, just dragging your unwanting feet up and down and all, forcing them forward, trying to remember the first way to go to get to his block, when you look up too late and slam right into somebody coming the other way.

You know Kurloz’s face the same second he knows yours.  For a second you see him and it don’t make sense—he’s not dressed formal, his back’s stooped tired, he’s out of where you’re familiar with seeing him and hell, it’s the middle of the day.

His face is unpainted.

“ _Brother_ ,” you choke out on your first struggling breath, and you stare around, forget for a second that you gone and did exactly the same before you left your block.  “—you—I got paints here—”

“I’m sorry.”

It’s sudden, hard like stones and iron cuffs, and it slams the breathing right from you.  Your eyes stare at him like the words he’s sayin’ ain’t ever been said. 

“—no,” you say, and it is a terrible thing, then, to see how he goes painful-flinching and then cold and sure, turning from you like there’s nothing left.   “—I—no, no brother, no _I’m_ sorry, goddammit I---so sorry, I’m so motherfucking sorry you got no idea I—”

“I said things I shouldn’t ought—”

“—fight on at you like you was an enemy and messiahs forgive me for—”

“—stay clear in the head and stay myself on level ground when—“

“— _hurt_ you and I could see that shit happen I’m so sorry, brother I’m sorry—”

You both break off a second, breathe hard and stare at each other and you know the second he sees how wet your eyes are because it’s the same second you see him blink and see the bright and purple just for a second at the corners of his.  At just the same second, the both of you draw your hands down over your faces, rub your eyes, pull away and for the first time in nights, you find a little laugh all stored off small and wobbly-weak in your thorax.

“ _…ain’t we the saddest joke_ ,” you mumble, and he goes _ha_ , quiet and bitter as he nods. 

“…we need to talk,” he says, and you should’ve fuckin’ known it couldn’t just be ‘sorry’ and forgot, but it still scares the shit out of you. 

“O-okay,” you say, and you think on Karkat’s hands on your hair and try not to let your voice go wobbly.  “Let’s—your room’s nicer than—“

“Not—anymore,” he says, and there’s a catch to his voice that makes you look at him sharper.  There’s…bruises on his hands, all up his fine, lean arms and shadows under his eyes.  Still his shoulders are fallen and stooped like he hasn’t slept.  “Your room.”  He nods to the door behind you, and you wince up for no reason you really get.  “…’s closer anyhow.”

It makes sense and you don’t know why you’d not want him in there, and you nod and turn and lead back there, silent and thinking and hands all knotted in your pockets. 

He stops when he gets to the door, raises his head.  Sniffs.  You see something in his face you don’t understand—you sniff a little too, tryin’ to smell whatever he did—all you smell’s the smell of you lying still, sweat and misery and just a little bit of the spicy stuff karkat’s uniform always smells like.

-

( _how long did he lie still and alone in the dark to leave that dead fog of his scent in one place, how long did he lie there and not eat and barely breathe—_ )

-

“I said shit I shouldn’t have said,” he says, sharp and fast, and you see him straighten himself up, hide in his mind from what he doesn’t want to have to say.  “—but I was angry for a reason, li—Gamzee—and you gotta get your understand on of what it is.”

“I—“ you start to straighten up, feel the first little spark of anger back in the back of your pan—and step down on that shit hard.  No.  Not doing that, not ever doing that again, no.  “…okay.”

He starts walking, up and down, back and forwards across your little block.  He steps around the spot you lay by your own self for all those hours, like he can see you there.  His eyes stay on the ground in front of him.  His mouth makes a tight line.

“…when I came out of that rage,” he says finally, “…I was leanin’ in to put my fangs through your throat.”

It shakes you, you can admit that easy, hearing the words is a shock in the horns, a fist in the stomach.  “—you quit though,” you say, and he closes his eyes.  Pulls them open again like it’s hard to do.  “You saw it was me, you stopped—I trust—“

“I _know_ you do,” he says, and for a second it grits out a growl.  He tightens his hands up on either side of him.  Lets go again.  “…yeah, I know.  But I don’t trust me like you do, little one.  Have you not even got a _notion_ of what I’d feel like with your lifeblood on my hands?  Because even if you figure it can’t ever happen, _me thinking it could_ ’s enough to—to scare the shit out of me.”

You both go quiet.  The stone lines of his face don’t give you a thing to look at but you can see his hands still tight and the words _scare the shit out of me it scare me it scares me_ are going round and round in your head.  He’s not supposed to be scared.  You’re not supposed to get him that way.

“… _this is so fucked up_ ,” you say, small and miserable and little, and he laughs a little, not like he finds it funny. 

“You imagine your little mutant moirail,” he says, and you cringe from what he’ll have you think on, you don’t want Karkat in this he’s too _small_ , he’s too soft.  “He trusts he’ll calm you, he trusts in you and him to have something there, brings you down when you’re in a killing rage.  You want him to stand in front of you when you’re mad?  You tell me truly if there’s not some part of you, wants that miracle-red blood _all over your hands_ —”

“ _Stop it_.”

He watches you a long second, and you don’t meet his eyes.

“…that’s what I thought,” he says, and drops his head in a long, long sigh.  “…and we ain’t pale, little one.  You imagine him standing there in front of you and determined not to soothe, you in your worst of rages, just fucking _imagine._ ”

Every bit inside you closes like a knot.  The thinking’s unthinkable, you and all your fury on Karkat, Karkat’s face torn and bloody and his hands down at his sides, his hands never rising to touch your face—

“I can hurt you,” Kurloz says, and he takes your chin in his hand and turns you up to him and your squawk blister is a solid choke. “But I can’t _hurt_ you.  Love, you know I couldn’t fuckin’ do that.  And you trustin’ me to do right by you, that’s a beautiful thing, that’s—” for a second, his mouth moves silent, his voice leaves him, and when it comes back it’s smaller somehow.  “…that’s more than I deserve by even most gracious of messiahs’ mercies, but you can’t put your life in my hands if I ain’t there to take care of it, _swear_ for me, Gamzee.  Swear on your goddamn soul.”

You nod, and all of you is shaking—he takes you by the shoulders and squeezes and the wounds he did before ache all over you. 

“ _Swear._ ”

“…I won’t…pull that shit again,” you say, and he nods, still waiting.  “…I swear.  I do, swear on my soul.  Swear on my ticket to the dark carnival, brother, if I got a choice that’s what I’ll not choose.”

He lets out a breath like you’ve taken a burning pain from him and he goes slumped and still all over.  He looks up at you a second; reaches out and tugs you forwards hard to hold on to like he’s holding the pieces of you together.  You squeeze him back, and it’s the tiniest littlest things that come to you sometimes; how his skin and muscle and all used to feel hard like stone.  Now there’s a give to him, and if he’s stone then you’re stone too, you and him, you’re under each other’s skin and you hurt each other with it real bad. 

…but…

“… _but you gotta not_ think _some time you fuck me now,_ ” you say in his shoulder, and he jumps a little.  “You were fucking _brutal_ , that shit was _gorgeous._ ”

“ _…don’t like it_ ,” he says, and the simple of the words makes your breath go catching and cold in your throat.  “Control _, little brother, it’s not a thing I give up easy—_ ”

“Then don’t,” you say, and he sighs a little, presses up his lips under one of your ears.  “…control that shit all you want, put that big-ass scream-hungry pan of yours in every clawline, don’t give a fuck particular as long as you just _fuck me like you want to tear me apart_.”

He goes stiff and still all over and then makes a little noise in his throat you wouldn’t ever have heard if his lips weren’t so close up against your ear.  “ _You got to give me_ warning _before you put out thoughts like that_ ,” he says, and he sounds just a little bit hoarse.  “Holy fucking _shit_ , you hungry little pailbait.”

“Oh good,” says a big, echoing-loud voice across the room from you, and you jump so hard you almost crack Kurloz’s horns on yours.  Karkat is standing in the door to the ablutions block, all in his black shirt and his clean little jeans, off-duty and armorless-soft and the remembering of how fucking pale you are for him hits the sting of Kurloz’s lips against your neck and you get all boiled-up and confused inside.  Karkat raises up his eyebrows at you over Kurloz’s shoulder—you feel him groan, teeth clicking and cool against your throat.  “I didn’t even hear any yelling, that was fast.”

“Vantas,” says Kurloz, all sorts of decent and even and calm as fuck, “…I figure it’s your very _best_ of motherfucking interests to _get out of the room._ ”

“Not really,” says Karkat, and Kurloz grinds his fangs.  “—since I was kind of in the middle of trying to fix the damage on this end.”  And you figure by the way Kurloz’s arms go tight on you he knows as well as you saw that Karkat’s eyes went to you when he said _damage._   Shit’s downright romantic, from a palemate, and god but it felt good when Karkat rubbed your horns and took care of you but then also are Kurloz’s hands gripping tight enough at your bandaged-up sides it stings all new and over again, and his teeth baring against your throat as he growls to himself.

“Uh,” you go, and they both go quiet, staring at you.  You look from the one to the other, and the trying to pick one makes your pan ache something _awful._   “I—fuck.”

“What’s your pleasure, little brother?” Kurloz asks, and he’s tryin’ not to push and you know and appreciate it, and Karkat opens his mouth and shuts it again and just _looks_ at you, don’t make an argument and not a word spoken.

“Sleep,” you say, and they both blink at you.  You blink too—you didn’t give a thought to that word before it came out—but for fucking honesty, it’s too much right now.  It’s too much to think on and decide and you been miserable and out of your head happy and you already went and came once tonight and you made up from your fight and you made a promise of the kind as can’t ever be broken and holy fucking _shit_.  “I want my slime and my ‘coon and a real nice quiet block and that’s about the farther reach of what I want right now.”

Kurloz and Karkat do the same tiny little half-a smile and huff through their noses and you want to take both their precious faces in your hands and kiss them but goddamn now you said it it sounds even nicer.  _Fuck_ , warmed slime and dark and quiet…

Karkat checks his little shiny imperial palmhusk and sighs.  “…I need to get back to her Condescension anyway,” he says, all reluctant, and Kurloz is stepping back from you, lingering, a touch of heavy cold on your skin.  “…since she’s obviously…” he glances at Kurloz, just the littlest flicker of a look.  “…done what she came here to do.”

“Shit was downright pornographic,” Kurloz agrees, mild as sopor, and Karkat goes red all over and bristles up.  Kurloz laughs again and leans down (just a little, not so much anymore) to kiss you real soft and pull you tight one more time.  In your ear, his voice is a warm little hum.  “… _that was fucking awful,_ ” he says, real quiet.  “ _…gonna do better next time._ ”

“Not gonna be a ‘next time’,” you say, but he’s already shaking his head.

“If we last as long as I pray every day we do…” he smiles at you, and his eyes are dark and fond, his fingers trace all down your face like he’s seeing you new.  “…it’s gonna happen again.  But we’ll do that shit better next time.  I’d swear to that.”

You nod, and he backs up and lets you turn down to Karkat.  He has to reach up and he’s so small and precious and he anchors you sweet and perfect and your eyes sting just to look on him, how much you love him.

“It’s okay,” he says, and you kneel down so you can hug each other proper, hug hard and tight and breathe in of each other.  “ _You’re okay._ ”

By the time he pulls away his eyes are as wet as yours feel, and he sniffs and straightens up and flickers into his uniform and doesn’t look right at you.  His eyes are all bright and red and wet. 

“Call me next time you need me,” he says, like he’s pissed off at you, and if you didn’t know him better you wouldn’t hear his voice do that little shake as is so goddamn precious.  “—instead of just lying around on the ground like a piece of shit.  Goddammit, you make my job hard.”

“Yeah, best friend.” 

Karkat turns up and looks at Kurloz, and you don’t see what his face does then but you see Kurloz’s eyes narrow.  You see his mouth thin and then fall into another sigh. 

And then he closes his eyes and leads the way out the room, and you’re alone in the dark and the warm and the quiet.

You don’t even remember getting into the slime, let alone the falling asleep.  But you remember warm like hot arms around you and dark and the breath of cool air from the mouth of your ‘coon like his breath across your skin and for just a second you’re so happy you don’t think you know how to breathe.

And then you don’t know anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a bunch of OCs in this story--I don't know who else would be interested in this but somebody sent me a private message on DW about clowns and genders, so thought I might as well sum my answer up here:
> 
> Kalyat, one of the older, well-experienced trolls who the GHB brought on the mission to rescue Gamzee, is gender-fluid. Generally considers his/herself female, and changes his/her paint to indicate the difference. Khalse (who killed the yellowblood psychic that took Gamzee down during Psycho-Clown-Capture-The-Flag) and Kin Krelle/The Untoxxic (who has yet to reveal themself in the story) are both nonbinary. 
> 
> Other than that, everybody is basically on one end or the other. More or less. :) I can't see a cult of murder-clowns looking forward to the universal circus apocalypse caring too much about gender binary, somehow.


	15. The Poison of This Court

You wake up next night in your slime, see the ruins of your block and for a second you are rage and despairing and fucking hatred.

And then you remember, and everything in you goes from lead to pure warm all in a second.  You laugh a little—laugh more than a little, throw your head back and _howl_ of it, not for mirth exactly but for joy and you think your messiahs won’t take it too harsh it’s one thing and not the other.  You have him still.  Still will he have you.  Still you _fucking have each other_ and that’s the first and hardest test passed.

When you’re done laughing your fucking ass off, you gotta make yourself get up out of the slime.  Now you ain’t rage-wild or all-focused on finding him to talk it out, moving makes groans go through you, cramp up your fronds and ache your back and your horns.  You are getting _too fucking old_ for all this emotional bullshit.  (Still in the prime of your sweeps but goddamn if those sweeps haven’t been hard-won and hard-worn.) 

Your husktop is beeping at you.

)(ER IMP----ERIOUS COND---ESCENSION [)(IC] _began trolling you_!

 

)(IC: )(ey anglafis)(

)(IC: )(ey w)(ere you at

)(IC: w)(aleternia to mot)(afuckin clownfis)( )(ilarity )(ideaway

)(IC: ma)( main gangsta t)(e S)(-----ELL you not answerin me

)(IC: w)(atebber

)(IC: listen i gotta party comin up and you gonna come and bring w)(oeva you glubbin’ want, top bitc)(’s orders

)(IC: and w)(en I spray ‘w)(oeva’ I mean your little loverbuoy.

)(IC: I got a bet wit)( t)(e uumbrage sayin youll s)(oal up and i KNOW you aint gonna make me lose a bet to some advisor c)(ump

)(IC: be t)(ere or be fis)( food

 

)(ER IMP----ERIOUS COND---ESCENSION [)(IC] _stopped trolling you_!

Goddammit, another party.  You ain’t been in forever, and for sure you been meaning to go again—all those fish-fuckers gotta be reminded now and again that you stand in their ranks and you hold power they don’t touch.  You been alive longer than them anyway, you have been _steady and never motherfucking_ ceasing at the hand of the empress and you like to go and watch their faces go still and their fins go purple when they gotta make courtesies at you.

Yeah, you figure, this once you’ll go.  This once, because Gamzee’ll get to see his shitblood and you get for all of them to see him so pretty and fine and _yours._   You’ll go.  You’ll put the time in and spit in their faces. 

It’s that happy thinking that gets you dressed up for the night and out your block among your own.  You get greeted and gladly when you walk among them, and you remember how long you been gone.  Days and nights, you’ve been alone in your room, alone in your pan, and then you’re back out again and you didn’t realize how long you missed the near of the family, the knowing of family all around you, their touch on your pan and pump biscuit.  You mess hair and knock horns and make apologies where pride allows for grievance, because you are a goddamn _king_ as Meenah saw so fit to remind, you are a king and you are needed away from your quadrants’ tragedies.

And then you leave a talk with feeder Barron, turn a corner ‘round and you see a shape of horn you recognize.

Gamzee’s got a palmhusk out, held up by his ear—when you get close enough you see his face all peaceful and hear a voice small but loud from husk speakers.  Your voice, recorded some godawful long time ago from sermon unknown.  You’re preaching the forgiveness of the faithful few and he’s listenin’ so hard he’s barely got his eyes open to get a watch on of where he’s walkin’ at.

You catch his shoulder just before he wanders into a wall.  He jumps and drops his palmhusk—those few others as are there jump too and pretend hard at not looking at you as he stares up at you and smiles.

“ _Bro_ ,” he says, and ducks down to pick up his palmhusk again.  “—bro look at all this shit I found!”

You get a look on at the screen, and recall the source of his listening—work of the Recorder.  Brother died too young.  Got a few hundred of faithfuls’ sermons before he went, though.  Can’t rightly recall if he got sanctified, but you should put another to work on that again, shit’s important.  Not a patch on a real sermon, but added on with real church that shit could be useful.

“You’re so fuckin’ great at pulpit, bro,” Gamzee says all earnest, and you shake yourself awake and grin at him. 

“You ain’t bad yourself,” you point out, “—hungry little scripture-bitch as you are and all.”

He purples at the edges of his face, ducks his head down. 

“Where you going to?”

He shrugs.  “Walkin’.”

You fall in together and walk with no need for another word, and it’s good just to walk side by side, and his strides not quite matching yours but coming always closer to it. 

…and…

…and now you are split, _truly divided on your motherfucking insides_ , because you see folks look at you together and you want to hold his hand all tangled up in yours or put yours on his shoulder or tug him by the horn like you do and you want to fucking _show off_ but now that betrayal sits in your pan and rankles at you.  You want to walk far from him.  Want to go back to when a worry on what they would think or do on him never crossed your pan. 

“…so,” Gamzee says after a half a while, and you can hear it in his voice, that feeling like pokin’ at something to see if it’s infected, moving your fingers to check if your arm’s snapped.  _Is this gonna hurt_.  “…haven’t…haven’t never seen you go so far over so little, bro.” 

He edges in a little closer, and you close your eyes and know you owe him what he wants to hear and hate yourself for wanting to walk off and not deal with it.  You turn your feet, take your walk off sharp to one side from the main walkways of the ship where there won’t be folks there to see you.  You had shit to _do_ today, dammit.  “…what was up with—”

“—with Travye?”  It comes out harsh and more bitter than you mean and he flinches a little, thinks maybe he angered you.  You force yourself into calm again.  You haven’t seen Travye’s face this afternoon, not even in passing.  You think he is avoiding your eye and of that you are grateful.

“…there was a good thing there,” you say, short and forced calm.  “Used to be.  Isn’t now.  But he…holds onto it beyond its time.”

And it’s the look on his face, the curious twitch and then the forced quiet where he stops himself, that pushes you on.  Wriggler is afraid of what he’ll learn.  Child is afraid of what’ll happen if he pushes.  And you don’t want him afraid of you, and you don’t want this secret rotting between the two.

“Yeah,” you say, and he jumps.  “Filled a pail.  Hell, a couple—four, maybe five seasons, I don’t properly recall, it was a long time ago.  Soon after those of us full-grown took to the ships and left the home planet.  I was still demanded to fill for the drones then.  Needed somebody and couldn’t fuckin’ wait for serendipity to lay fronds on me, so yeah, I knew him well enough.” 

Gamzee is silent.  A waiting and hungry silence, his mouth is tight shut and his eyes can’t look up at yours.

“…I’d let go of that longer ago than you were hatched by far,” you say, and he takes a slow little breath.  “Looks like he _didn’t_.”  And that word’s a growl, and he jumps a little and looks up at you before you can get it back under control.  The silence stays on, drags words out your mouth like a shitblood on trial, words on words on words like confession can save.  His feet falter to a stop—you walk on and then turn and pace back, and turn again, walking that small space of the corridor like a beast in a cage. “—worried for days on top of days if some shit-panned motherfucker’d seek you out to do some harm on you and I come down to find you and you up against the wall like that with those breaths like you were fucking _hurting_ for air and who’s holding you?  Who’s _fucking_ holding you there? “

You laugh and it comes out entirely fucking _unfunny_. 

“…The measure of being known is hurting, brother,” you say, and you’re quoting some shit, can’t recall what just yet but god you never understood entirely until this whole stupid clusterfuck went down.  “I let go any affections for that idiot an age ago, but I trusted him still and _this—_?” You spit the word, _this_ whole and entire the mess that dragged the two of you down, _this_ his feet off the ground hanging and helpless, _this_ the betrayal and the fear on his face, _this_ his voice as you heard him, _‘brother, don’t, please—_ ‘.  “—this fuckery, I thought _better_ of him.”

“…he was trying to—” Gamzee starts, but you don’t want to hear him, his innocence, his hope, his gentle pusher you don’t have the time for because that venom betrayal is in you and you want to hurt something just from thinking it. 

“And you go and look up at me and _smile,_ ” you say, and when you force that word through your throat it cracks bad enough you can’t put it back into a whole and Gamzee flinches all over but this time it ain’t fear.  “— _smile_ at me, why, to make me _feel better_ , little one?  Tryin’ to tell me you’re just fucking _fine_ and you betrayed by your own family and you still reaching for air and _you crying_.”

“I didn’t,” he says, a cut half a sentence.  “I wasn’t, I, I never—brother I didn’t even—”

“I trusted him once with name and body and _bare motherfucking face_ and he _hurt you_.”

Takes the breath out of him.  He makes a little noise like you choke him the same as Travye did, and you hate yourself just at thinking that.  You try to calm your voice, try to temper your angry standing, but it’s hard.  It’s fucking hard. 

“…for what he did to me,” you say, real calm, calm as all motherfucking hells of silence.  “…and for what he did to you both, little brother.  And ain’t that enough?”

There’s silence for a long, long second.  Another.  Then he sighs long and low.

“…brother,” he says.  “I.  You’re all—you make—”

He stops again, and you wait with your hands tight at your sides, fight not to show at your singing-tight nerves in the look of your face. 

“…you make me wanna kiss you,” he says, all plaintive small.  “—you all strong and old as fuck and all, and me sitting here all my dumb-ass pity for you.  The fuck is that right?”

Like something snapping off inside you.  You slump down with the relief of it.  “…can’t say, little one,” you say, and he smiles one-sided at you, like he’s half not sure himself whether things are fixed.  “But if it’s kissin’ me you got a mind to do I’m not gonna argue you on it, for fuckin’ sure.”

He smiles realer that time, comes a little closer and it feels right to take his frond and pull him up closer to you, lean down to kiss his lips once.  He’s smiling as you kiss him, and it’s the best of ways to be. 

And then your pan kicks at you, throws up a thought of a memory that’s important, and you pull back away again.

“Oh,” you say, and he blinks up at you.  “Got a do at Meenah's place.  Could come if you want.  Vantas...he'd be there."

Gamzee blinks and then crinkles up his precious face all confused and then eases out again even-keel and bright.  Looks pleased as ringside.  “Wow,” he says, and the smile is real and wide and bright.  “—wow, seriously?  No fuckin’?”

You know what he means and no you ain’t fuckin’ around with him but you can’t stop yourself when he leaves you a spot all wide-open like that to misunderstand him real good.  “Oh, I dunno," you say, and he rolls his eyes at you and doesn’t tell you to stop.  "...Think her fancy fuschia shit could do with some purple.  Just to change it up."

“Can we fuck on a table?”

Your laugh is loud and sudden and true and he looks so innocent at you, all hoping.

“We can abso-fucking-lutely fuck on her fancy-ass tables.”  You think a second and then fix, “…when there ain’t so much food on them or folks around for me to fuck up for staring at your pretty ass.”

“ _Bitchtits._ ”  He stops for a second, as to consider his next move, and then just pulls himself up a little to kiss you again.  “—and then sometime you gotta put my studs back in, what my horns healed over when I cocooned.”

Aw shit, you remembered the scars would go but yeah, now you think it he ain’t got his rings in his ears or the bolts through the cores of his horns no more.  Well you have a _hell_ of a fun time putting them in on the first go, and you’re sure as fuck having the time of your life with the second run. 

“I will put _hells_ of fuckin’ holes in you,” you promise.  “—but for now…I gotta talk to you on _parties._ ”

-

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and this party is the ass-backwardest most least mirthful bitch-ass party you ever seen.

The church don't do like the colder bloods do, not like the ones in front of you--they wear gold enough their hands must weigh on them like stone, gold on their horns, on their necks and fins and in their clothes.  Your neck is bare--that shit's church custom--and your rings are iron with stones of all colors on each finger.  Those stones are sharp, and their settings are deep and tight--your hands have claws on the one side and a club of stone and iron on the other, all masked up as cheap glitter.  Your paint is detail and finery, painted with tiny brushes, set and sealed so no blasphemous motherfucker can catch a glimpse accidental of your holy face.  Your only gold is the studs in your horns and the two biggest of the rings in your ears--everything else is steel and iron and ink-black and spectrum stones, scattered on you and worked in like blood splattered up from some holy work. 

They’re all standin’ around inside this big-ass hall in the Condescension, block all full of red-purple and gold and flickin’ fins and dumb capes and everybody’s talkin’ and sneerin’ and carryin’ around little tiny cups of somethin’ that you hope to god is a good strong drink because you’re sure as fuck gonna need it.  This ain’t a party.  Nobody laughing, nobody fighting nobody dancing or even makin’ out which you figure is the least of all you should get at any party.  Just making faces at each other and makin’ like to whisper in little hisses.

When you and Kurloz walk through the door, everything stops.

You haven't been anywhere off church fleet for a reason that didn't end in killing somebody for more than a sweep now, and you can feel your hands curling up for your clubs and your hair prickling where it trails down the back of your neck towards your spine.  If you were still a tiny motherfucker, a grub or a bit older, you'd be all spiked up and hissing. 

But you ain't a grub anymore, and your hair's too long now for prickling up.  Kurloz don't touch you, but you can feel him there on your side and behind.  It calms some part of you and whispers at it _eyes on your back_ , oculars you know and trust.  You are motherfucking watched for.  Brine-suckers stare at you and flick up their fins at you as you walk in, and your tiny little stunted-up fins try to flare at them back, hidden under your hair. 

And then the empress stands up.

"Whale don't just sand around starin'," she says, and it snaps out like a whip-crack all sudden-like and loud.  "You got a guest a honor in front a you so glubbin' BOW."

It's so much an order, and so much does her voice grab at you, you start to bend a knee before you can think about it.  Kurloz puts a hand on your shoulder.  Holds you up to keep you from bending over. 

"Look at their motherfucking faces," he chuckles, just low enough you can hear, and nods low and smooth at the empress across the room.  She waves a hand at him like _fuck off_.  You look around; now every head’s bowed down, everybody's fins are flared up.  Everybody's faces are all angry and frowning-sharp.  They look like somebody just pissed in their grubsauce and you laugh too, really quiet.  Kurloz’s voice is a snarl, little laugh all vicious and shivering down you.  "Don't like gettin' told to bow to a sandlicker, huh?"

Another second, and then, like it's all on a signal, everybody gets straight again and goes back to talking.  Kurloz nods like it's a message.  You are so fuckin' lost.  He notices, because he laughs again a little and takes off walking.  For all he looks so at home here, so not even a touch of unsteady to his smile, he walks close to shadows.  He keeps his sides and his back to walls where he can.  He moves like a subjugglator on hunt, and you wonder if he even notices he's doing it.

"...bowed for five ticks," he says to you, under the talking as you walk up the long hall.  You think on his voice, not the stares, not the fins and gills and colder eyes than you all around.  "Shortest they can bow and not break rules.  Shortest they can bow and still count it as a courtesy on us.  Anything less that that--shit would be insulting.  Don’t wanna fight me on it, don’t slight the empress to stand again too early.  Any more and it might actually give it a look like they figure we belong." he bares his teeth like he just told a funny joke, like all you're gettin' your gab on of some story to make you laugh.

"... _should_ get their motherfucking respect on," you say, and it comes out more bitter-sharp than you mean.  You'd want to make friends, another time, you'd want to talk at all of them and have them like you.  But you ain't on sopor no more and you got your understand on real clear of the reproach in their eyes.  You meet a stare and hold it and the finned face goes all still and confused when the pan behind it catches out that you ain't looking away.  They look away first, start whispering even more. 

"...'s right," says Kurloz.  You jump and turn and he's got oculars on you, a smile more real and more warm.  "You stare 'em down, little one.  You piss 'em off.  You don't let them in your pan."  He looks over your shoulder--you can't feel it, not for real, but you imagine the eyes you just met now on the back of your neck.  Kurloz's voice drops a little.  "..colors 14."

_No fear, brothers and sisters, no fear of the waders, the brine-drinkers.  There's no mirth in the sea and no painting the water doesn't wash off and you've got your hands on the righteous shit they won't ever know._

_No fear of the waders, for you're higher than them._

_You're higher than anybody._

You meet his gaze and he nods and you straighten yourself up and know what he's telling you. 

"Gamzee!"

You know that voice with your body before you even get to thinking with your pan.  You turn around and look, and then look again, lower--Karkat stomps up to you in his brightest most shiny-ass uniform, looking you over.  You're surprised somehow to see--for all he wears his miracle color on his sleeve, burning-red like star-death, he's got gold on his wrists, rings on his fingers and in his ears, he has two little rings around his horns that must have been made for him, and you think on the empress putting them there and hiss down low in the back of your throat.

Karkat's too far down at the ground though, so he don't hear.  He stops moving for a second, thinking, and then he...bows at you, really careful and slow. 

You take a step closer, start to reach out for him to pick him up and hug him instead, but then Kurloz puts a hand on your shoulder again.

" _Not...here_ ," says Karkat, so quiet you barely hear him, so still you barely see his lips move. 

"With him on that," says Kurloz, and he squeezes a little bit. 

"But--you said piss people off," you start, and Kurloz lets out half a laugh. 

"Not by showing them what's precious to you," he says, and suddenly it makes sense, how he hasn't touched you more than a hand on the shoulder, how he's always a little behind you keeping an eye on your back. 

"Kur--" you start, and then you actually use your pan for once and snap your trap shut on the name.  "...y...your lordship, what am I doin' here?"

"--political statement," says Karkat, and "--Meenah's fucking with me," says Kurloz at the same time.  They glare.

"Her Condescension doesn't pull petty bullshit like that," says Karkat, all sharp and edgy.  "Believe it or not, every single interaction she has with you and your gross church isn't just some kind of solicitation--"

" _Being as I'm the one who she_ hate-fucks _every couple of sweeps_ ," Kurloz hisses, and he's got his big fake smile on but he's gettin' all twitchy and you know he's pissed.  " _I figure I'd know better than you. Mutant_ fucktoy."

Karkat draws up like an angry meowbeast and you start to go forward, step between them—

"Whale whale whale, if it isn't the grand highblood," says a voice you know real well, and Kurloz and Karkat jump apart like guilty wrigglers as your whole body goes stiffened up.  The empress's hands slide up around your shoulder and her claws tap the back of your neck under your hair.  There are folks watching--you get yourself to _not_ hiss at her, but it's a close thing. 

"Your Condescension," says Karkat, stiff-like, and you see his eyes go from you to her to you again.  "...please--"

"Yeah yeah yeah," says the empress, and she takes her hand away again.  Can't get your relax on with her still up and in your business like that, but you can take your shoulders down from around your auriculars at least.  Her hand is moved, sure, but you don't figure she's happy to have to--and there's some bit of you, because you're a dumb-ass who wants things you can't have, misses the fierce cold prickle that buries its claws in your guts when she touches you.  You want to bite her.  This is motherfucking stupid.

" _Why am I here?_ " You grit at her through your teeth, and you're glad of that your back is to most of the waders here, because you ain't sure you can keep a smile on your face for her.  You're tryin', but it's fucking hard.  You just keep remembering how she didn't get you last time, how she fucked you and Kurloz over both and how his voice sounded when she drove you over the edge like that. 

"You're angler's _matesprit_ ," she says, like you're a dumb wriggler, and you're dumb alright but you don't want _her_ coddling at you.  "Gotta net you over here for a party swimtime, buoy.  Make it clear I _sup-port the union._ "

Karkat makes a really quiet noise like somebody hurt him.  The empress takes her claws off you and goes to go and put them on Karkat instead, and he goes all red to his ears and bows down his precious little nubby head when she rubs his shoulders through his big heavy purple-gold clothes.  “Besides,” she says, and Karkat’s face goes all far off and his mouth drops a little bit gaping open when her hands move up the back of his neck, rub into the roots of his hair and fuck her, that’s for _your_ hands, he’s _yours._   Her eyes are on you when she gives a little pinch on one horn and he makes a noise all soft and needy and sways around—she lets go as your eyes burn with angry red and your fangs get grinding. “…you’re also li’l Nubs’ moirail.  Gotta get you here, makes him look more shrimportant.”

"Or you want me throwing him in the deep end to see if he can fucking _swim,_ " says Kurloz, and his hand goes out like a striking scalebeast--he's got a blueblood server by the neck.  " _Drinks,_ " he says, and he's not even in the motherfucking _hiveblock_ of fucking around, there's a hiss of chucklevoodoos under the words.  "Now, motherfucker."

"Yes--yes sir!"

Kurloz lets go and the guy goes running off.  He watches him go, and you almost don't see how his eyes go sweeping over the rest of the room as he turns back to your little group.  "...wonder if somebody's gonna poison it this time," he says vaguely.  "You're drinking first, Meenah.  Unless..." he grins at Karkat and this time it's a real grin, true Messiahs-blessed humor in his eyes.  "...you wanna volunteer your _pet mutant._ "

"You can drink your own poison," says the empress, and ruffles up Karkat's hair.  "Now go and mingle, you cagey old guppy.  Parties are for glubbin' fun and shit!"

"Not _your_ parties," grumbles Kurloz, but she's already gone.  He blows out a hiss through his teeth and rubs the back of his neck like he's getting stiff and all tensed up in him already, then turns and looks at you.  "...bitch is right," he says, like he's done you wrong and he needs to get his worries on at you.  "Makes us look scared.  Like we ain't fit to talk to these motherfucking waders.  I skip enough of these stupid-ass parties like it is, they been saying I _finally learned my place._ "  He says it like a curse.  The little blueblood comes back up—Kurloz takes his drink, grabs him, pours it in his gaping mouth.  Not a thing.  Kurloz nods and takes what’s left, sniffs it, throws it back.  “— _not fucking strong enough._ ”

"You can't stick together."  Karkat don't flinch when Kurloz bares his teeth, and there's a part of you that sits with your longer teeth and darker skin that makes a rumbling start up in your thorax, warning at the both of them.  They both jump and look on you different and new and you swallow the noise best you can.  The blueblood makes a tiny little sound and takes off.

"Why the fuck not?"

"...because it makes you both look scared," Karkat repeats.  "The only landdwellers at the party who aren't enlisted directly under the empress, clinging onto each other in the corner like you're glued to each other by your own gross fluids, makes you look like you're fucking afraid of them, and you don't know these guys, they'll go for that like sea-going snapbeasts--"

" _Karkat,_ " you say, and your voice is weird, all coming out urgent and small-like from your squawk-blister.  " _Brother I_ am _fucking scared._ "

He looks hard on you for a second, then sighs and moves closer enough he can touch your hand.

"I know you are, you useless lump," he says, and the tip of his claw makes a shape on your frond that you know for a tiny little diamond.  "It's okay.  Just...we'll eat in a bit here, and you don't have to talk to people.  They don't want to talk to you anyway.  Then you just wander around and pretend you're friends with them and watch them make faces like fish out of water."  He gives the shittiest littlest smile at you, and your pusher melts at him.  Maybe he sees it, because he frowns again and swats you on the arm.  "Well, go on.  You're at the top table with the rest of us important shitwads.  Go find your seats.”

You go.  They’re setting food out—some eating some sitting some standing, and you find two seats right up there with your sign on it and settle yourself down.

“ _Say your prayers,_ ” Kurloz says in your ear, and lingers his hand across your shoulder.  “…eating soon.”

You do as told.  Calms the shakes gettin’ their move on up and down your fronds to put ‘em together and bow your head.  Quiets your pan spinning off around and around to remember your way back to the colors of the chapel.  Folks move, talk, sit around you.  You think you feel Kurloz near you, that weird humming gets on and up your horns when you’re praying close by the by of him.  You keep your head down and pray like hell you’re gonna get through this.

You only get woke up when somebody says real loud, “ _Her Imperious Condescension_ will eat first.”

She’s two seats down from you—got Kurloz right there at her right, and it’s known to every fucker in the galaxy the fishbitch has no quads to speak of, but he’s at where a moirail oughta be and they’re talkin’ quiet.  Karkat’s to her left as where a guard always is, and he ain’t eating.  Got his eyes sharp and keen on all around you, and you find it right in you that he sits to _your_ right as a moiral should ought to. 

For all this party is fucking awful and you feel fucking awful, the food is fucking _spectacular._   Motherfucking miracles all up in your nutrition extraction cavern with every bite, and you shovel it down and take more because you’re never _not_ hungry now you’re grown and growing.  Karkat is doin’ the same, but fighting at it like he don’t want to be seen taking too much and all.  You offer him bits of food and he sighs and snarls and rolls up his eyes at you but takes it from you any-fucking-how.  Kurloz still talking at the empress, these two great old heads bowed down and big old horns bent close to each other and you stop sometimes and wonder what they’re getting their coverse on of but hell if there’s a way for you to find out.

The food lasts forever, until even you feel good and full inside, and you captchalogue some of the best stuff and don’t care when you get gross looks off a couple violets thinking you for a greedy fuckin’ savage.  Miracles like this shit should be kept and _appreciated_ and if they ain’t in the mood well that’s their bit.  You’ll eat it naked in your respiteblock reading scriptures they can’t get their know on of and you will fucking _love it._

But the eating does have to stop, some time.  You get yourself up and walk away a bit—Karkat nods like that’s good and pushes you on a bit.  “Can’t hang around your moirail the whole time,” he says firmly.  “Go on.  _Go on_ , get going.  I have to go _mingle._ ” And he says _mingle_ like Kurloz says _blaspheme,_ all heavy and sick and pointed at the edges. 

You leave him as you were told and get your walk on down the table to Kurloz instead.  You get around the fish-bitch’s pushed-back chair and see seadwellers all around him.  He don’t seem to notice them looking on him unkind—he’s laughing.  You step a bit closer, try to make out the words.

"--is that a circus in your skirt or are you just hateful to see me and he says _making a good start on both_ and the _midget_ \--oh, hey Makara."

It's so weird having him call you by your second name again.  All the seadwellers standing around turn a little to glare at you, and you can see they don't have a right and good appreciation for good church jokes because they got looks on their faces like they just found behemoth leaving in front of their pretty palaces.  Behind them, Kurloz grins at you and winks. 

"You get to actually hear this one now you're pupated, little brother," he says, and pats the chair next to him.  "C'mere, I'll start over."

"I'm sorry," says one of the seadwellers so fast it blurs into one big word, and he gets up fast.  "I believe I see one of my superiors looking for us."

They're up and gone before you can do more than smile at them all.  Kurloz leans back in his chair, grins big enough for three faithful. 

“Waders,” he says.  “—no love of a _good joke._ ”  He pats your shoulder, fast and not lingering, not to hint to the others as have eyes on you.  “What’s here for you to come back over?  Just needing on a familiar face?”

You glance on up at him and see no judging in his eyes.  “…well.  Yeah, brother,” you say, and he smiles at you real sweet, like he gets you.

“To leave the family after so long,” he says.  “It ain’t no small thing.  But you can’t just come on over here all night, wriggler.  Not for anything more than this, not for long.”

You hunch up a little bit.  He don’t look down at you—looks out, like he’s not even knowing of you being there anymore, and barely moving his mouth and all like it’s the end of the world to be seen talking at you and this party fucking sucks.  “Hush now, brother,” he says, and you wish for hive and block.  “Not so long now, Meenah ain’t one for a long trawl.  _Haul_.A long _haul._   Motherfucker.” He pinches at his nose for a second between the eyes, sighs and looks back up.  “… _we’ll be back on holy ground soon,_ ” he says, and you can hear the same tired in him that you feel in you, that sense of wrong and wanting, being away from a good thing that you _need._   “Now, go talk a bit more.”

“But—”

“Go on, get.”  He pushes you a little.  “…you ain’t gotta do much.  Just talk at ‘em in all honesty, they can’t fucking stand that.  Pisses ‘em off no end.”

And so you do, and you find it to be motherfucking gospel.  A wader asks you all fakey-fake big-ass mirthless grin what you thought of the eating and you tell him the fish tasted _great_ and smile at him all your teeth and he finds reason to walk off.  Fin-faced bitch in too much shiny shit and all purple and gold asks on the inquisition and you describe until her fins are all pale and she finds reason too, hauls ass off away from you. 

It’s eight or ten talks later you’re leanin’ up on a pillar, eatin’ fish you snagged off the nutrition plateau with your fingers and watchin’ folks get pissed off at you quiet-like behind their hands, when Karkat comes to you again and leans down next to you on the pillar. 

“ _I am so tired of this shit_ ,” he says quietly.  “ _You wouldn’t_ believe _how—_ “

And then, all sudden-like as he’s still talking at you,somebody coughs.

“I don’t believe you…have ever been invited to one of Her Condescension’s…banquets before,” says a voice, and you and Karkat turn and look and see another wader, big surprise, a shitload of flashy gold, gold buttons, gold boots, stupid-ass little cape-thingy.  You wonder real quick on Eridan from back home—where he’s at, if he’d ever even wear that dumb little shitty cape thing as only comes down a little way of his back.  This guy’s got horns looping back around his head in big arcs, hair kinda curly like yours, but fins considerable bigger and purple just that much more reddish.  He talks all strange at you, stops in weird places and sniffs with his big long hooky seadweller nose.  “You’re…Makara.”

“Yeah, brother,” you say, and he smiles but don’t mean it at the word _brother._   Motherfucker don’t even _appreciate._   Hasn’t got his _know on._   “We do it better back on fleet.  Food’s the _shit_ though.”  You take another bite of fish—goddamn but you ain’t lyin’, that shit is _tight._   “ _Mm._   How’s a motherfucker even know how to make a thing taste like that?”

“A recipe, I would assume.”  He smiles again, smaller and not-laughing.  “—I don’t worry about…peasant things like…cooking.”

You laugh a little, more at his stupid little stops to sniff than because he said any shit as was worth laughing.  He laughs too—but you don’t figure either of you got the pusher for it and that shit just does go and make you feel a touch more dirty, little more blasphemous.  Laughing should be real shit.  Laughing being a prayer every time and all, miracle of joy coming right out your mouth when the happy can’t stay in anymore, not wasted on waders with nothing to say.

“Cooking gets done by us, back on the fleet.” You recall getting a listen on of that some time, messiahs only know who said it at you or when.  Maybe it was those first perigees when you were still sopored and useless.  Shit’s blurry from back then.  “Be nice to get back to it but I’ll miss the food for fuckin’ sure—”

 “Well, that’s…to be expected.  You just don’t belong here, really…do you?” 

You stop.  It’s a friendly voice, it’s words not rude and it’s true enough—this is a wader party.  Belonging ain’t a thing you’re doing.  But…

“His Lordship’s been a subjugglator longer’n you been alive, though,” you point out, and that makes his big smug smile get a little less big, a little less smug.  In service of holy mirth you should not be pleased at seeing a smile fall, but his you think messiahs would make exception.  “He’s got his belong on to be with the Empress.  More than any other motherfucker here, I’d figure.”

“Well.  _He_ may have earned it through…service.” He sniffs and you feel your smile drop.  “…although—and of course I mean no _offense_ , but—service to the empire…can’t change the color of one’s _landdweller_ blood.  Honestly, neither of you should be subjected to…socialization on a level of civilization which…you just simply aren’t capable of.”

“Come on, Gamzee,” says Karkat, and you don’t want to turn, your back’s bristling and your fins all flaring up and you’re starting to get a figure of how he talks down to you, you’re starting to see the fucking _poison_ in this court but Karkat takes your arm and turns you away.  He’s squeezing so hard even you feel a twinge of hurting of it, for all your tough hide.  “I think I saw—”

“Yes,” he says behind you, and you close your eyes and fight yourself numb through the victory and harsh hiss of it, pretend you’re on sopor again, pretend everything’s _just fucking fine—_ the fussy little sniffing isn’t there when he lowers his voice down, all that stupid-ass accent leaves him when he hisses at your back, “— _go tell your owner to drag you back into the filth you came from_.”

And there’s Kurloz, right off in front of you dark against the stars in the window, talkin’ at the empress and smilin’.  And there’s the color of his blood on his sleeves like he’s proud, there’s his noble head held high, there’s him and down below in the docks there’s the rest of the holy fleet out and around you and _filth_ he says, _your owner—_

"What.  The _fuck_.  Did you just say."

" _Gamzee_ ," says Karkat, sharp little hisses like needles, " _Gamzee, leave it, he_ \--"

"I said ask your _owner_ to take you back to the scum you dirtbloods wallow in," says the seadweller again, and his voice ain’t a hiss anymore, it’s just _saying_ like his every word is fact and every fucking word slams home at you like a slap.  You can feel your fins flaring up and your shoulders hunch to respond and your teeth bare and your claws curl.  "Your kind don't belong here with… _real_ highbloods."

"Motherfucker," you say, and it comes out weird and gritted-out through your fangs, it comes out twisted-up around the growl that's opening your choke and rumbling your thoracic cage.  "You are _pushing me real close_ to a line you don't wanna cross _\--"_

"You see?" he makes that little sniff, snort in the back of his throat like he don't want to laugh out loud and it is a _blasphemy_ of laughter, it is a mother—FUCKING— _JOKE—_   "This abhorrent devotion to non-quadranted trolls, to... _family..._ there is something _wrong_ with your little cult _-_ -"

Punching a seadweller is like hitting a wall under a thin layer of meat.  He goes back and half-falls, but he's not out and your hand stings like fuck and everybody goes quiet so fast it's like they got switched off. 

" _Say whatever the_ FUCK _you want about me,_ " you say at him, and it echoes, your horns are humming and your thoracic cage is tight and your eyes burn.  "But you talk shit about my family and I can't--fucking-- _allow--_ "

" _Perverted freak,_ " spits the seadweller, and he ain't as tall as you when he gets back to his feet but he's at least as broad and you're scared shitless and angrier than you ever been both at the same time.  "Are you challenging me?!"

"Not if you wanna eat that foul bullshit you just threw on me and mine," (and you can see Kurloz on the other side of the room, see his eyes go wider under his paint and his shoulders go tense and it's him you're angry for, for how he care for even the youngest and smallest of his brothers and sisters, how your family came for you when any other color would leave you rot.  _Fuck_ him.  Fuck all of them lookin' down on you--)  " _Take it back_ and we don't need--"

"Oh, I think we do," he interrupts, and there's a run of purple down his lip where you punched him and the seeing of that makes your whole insides shiver, something that's more and bigger than making him _repent his foulest heresy_.  You want more of that, you want it on your hands, want it over your paint and under your claws-- "In fact--if _you_ would like to beg for forgiveness...maybe I would be inclined to--"

The noise you make don't even have the shape of words but it makes it real clear for him how you feel about that.  He smiles, and you know he wouldn't have forgiven for whatever.  You pull out your clubs, and everyone gets back real quick.  He takes out a sword, and it looks thin and like you could break it easy, but you know waders get better steel, better everything.  It'll be as tough as his face was. 

You circle, and your bile sac is knotted and cold.  Real fight.  Real fucking fight, a challenge fight, not a drop and break like you do on your missions.   Can't go yet.  Can't make a move yet.  You can block him, but not too many times, not with him a seadweller and all that shit.  Karkat is watching you, can't think about him, Kurloz is watching you, and _him_ you can think on, him you can look at.  You can look on him and think _freak, cult, your useless_ family--and the anger burns up in you. 

" _Come on, sandsucker,_ " he hisses at you, and he holds his sword like he knows how to use it, but he holds it too like he don't take you seriously.  " _We'll see if your owner_ _ever dares to come back where he's not wanted after I bleed you out of your_ dirty, worthless color _all over the floor--"_

"Come on, _wader_ ,' you say, and you don't bother to say it quiet, you say it loud enough everybody hears and people mutter and hiss.  "You think you're better than us, you _motherfucking PROVE IT._ "

He comes at you so fast you don't have time to get your clubs up.  You throw yourself back away from his steel instead, huff out all your breath and hit the ground backwards and rolling, straight back up on your feet.  Don't think he figured you for the dodging type; he backs off as you swing your clubs a little, gettin' their holy weight settled down nice and tight in your hands.  If he knocks one away you're pretty well fucked. 

You make like to swing on his right and he flinches but don't fall for it entirely, not enough to open up.  He wants to stand and fight still and face to face, but your training says different and you're circling again, watching him watch your spinning clubs, watching him turn to keep you in his sights.  He's talkin' shit about your family again, but you don't fucking care, you're doing what needs doing to make him eat whatever he says.  The words are far-off for the second.  The words are not even a thing even for all the little jitters they make your fronds take on and the way your skull hums with the grind of fangs on fangs.

" _You sound like some peasantbloods I got my meet on of once,_ " you tell him, and his face becomes the green who fucked you, the yellow who slammed you back whenever you tried to go for them to make them stop, "...shitty blood is shitty blood whether or not that shit's dressed up in fins."

"You should have been left to die, you little damaged piece of _cullbait_ ," he sneers, and that stabs at you right under your thoracic cage all sharp as his steel because that shit is a truth, it is fucking true and you know that.  He goes for you seconds later, fast like a striking scalebeast, and you spin off to one side and throw out a hit at him going past.

You're lucky; he don't hold his arm nearly straight enough as he stabs and you clip his elbow hard enough he staggers.  Go for him again--but he's too far past and you get nothin' but his showy-ass little cape.  That knock on his arm won't hardly stop him fighting, but you got in your first hit and your punch drew first blood and your spine is prickling for more.

He's still talking.  You don't give him time to get a good finish on the end.

You go right at him as he chatters on and on at you, and all his heretic words die off in a little yelp you want him to make more of, _more of that,_ more of him in shock and in pain and you wonder what he'd do if you broke his fingers, you want him on the ground with your _fangs_ in--

He hits your clubs back and then goes for you again and you bring your clubs up this time, fast enough to lock with his blade.  If you can get a second to breathe you can spin outta that, you got this you can--

\--but he don't stay blocking.  He drops it to one hand and as you fall forward with the sudden loss of his strength you meet his fist coming the other way and your hands are both full and you got nowhere to go.  You twist as much as you got in you and the punch as would've caved in your chitinous wind tunnel hits like a hammer on your cheek and up past your eye, this great big _cracking_ pain.  You make the smallest noise, littlest groan as it sparks up and down you, but you don't flinch from the pain like you know he wanted you to, you don't jump back on all that natural instinct shit, you snap back from the punch and then snap forward from it and you slam your nugbone hard into his nose.

Now does he stagger back like he meant you to, and now do you as well, still all sorts of reeled around and dizzy--even the soft bits of his face hurt like hitting your head on a rock and the pain is one thing (great, glorious thing) but the dizzy from slamming your thinkpan like that is another deal.  People are talking all around you.  Muttering, like.  Fucking _good._   You can't but hope they're enjoying the goddamn _show._

Kurloz is watching you, and you can see his blank face on, his _what's in my pan ain't any other fucker's business but mine_ face, but you can also see the tight watching, waiting set in his shoulders.  And at the edge of it all a twitch of a smile, the pride burning up in his oculars like the glow in heating metal. 

"You wanna take it back now?" 

He's got blood all down his face now, and for all he's tougher than you are and you're gonna have the prettiest goddamn bruises on you, his nose is a ruin and you are on fucking _fire._   In answer of your question he just spits out blood. 

You fight, and it’s almost a praying, how distant your pan goes, how fast you can move when you don’t have to think on it.  His sword catches you on the arms, the sides until you’re bleeding in a hundred little places, just once he nicks a fin with the barest tip of the blade and you have to stagger back and gasp at that, it’s too fucking _much_ and your vision flashes with it.  You get him back again with your clubs—again, then again, and you aim for the same arm with each strike and slowly his fast little stabs do start to falter and go wide, his hand gets a steady little tremble on.

And then he gets close and tight in on you so sudden you got no time for a real block, strikes out with his sword’s pretty little gold handle and catches your left frond right inside the bend.

Your whole arm _stabs_ at you like he sliced it open instead of just landing a hit—your fingers go numb and shivered and useless and he comes back around on your weakened grip and slams your club right out your hand. 

It spins away and he backs up to laugh and you watch your weapon come slow to a stop at a pair of clean little boots all shiny-black, you see a pale face and red eyes and Karkat’s watching you like you’re killing him with every move, like if he was more scared he’d fall down on his knees and die of it.  Karkat’s looking at you like he’s waiting for you to fuckin’ _die_ and you can’t tolerate him with that face on.

Time to make an ending of it.

You go straight for the wader heretic with your arm pulled back wide, snarl and raise a club for a killing strike and he sees the places you’re softest open wide and takes the bait you’ve held up for him.  You see him laugh as he comes at you like that shit is slowed right the fuck down so you can see every single goddamn second of it.  You see him think you a stupid goddamn wriggler, wild trash-blood who don’t know how to fight how you want, _how to kill with MOTHERFUCKING INTENTION._   You see Kurloz’s eyes all wide, his calm mask gone in fear that just about tears you to bits.  You see Karkat open his mouth around your name and the look on his face kills you more sure than any wader sword.

It’s a twist to the side at the last second, keeps the sword from going right through your guts.  The blade goes deep into you—but it’s just in your side, won’t go through no important shit and you lean into the blade and feel the cold and pain slide through you like melted-up metal in your insides and _moan_.

That grin he showed at you, _look at the stupid wriggler finally snap,_ drops right off his face.  He lets go of the sword and backs away fast and hard when you swing a club at him and groan again and his face is motherfucking hilarious.  You leave the sword there in your side and spin your club again and walk toward him and he steps back and back again, the waders all around fall back to leave your path and you feel like a fucking _god._

“ _What is_ wrong _with you_?” he asks, “—what— _are_ you?”  And there is real and true fear in his voice all of a sudden, real most genuine fear.  It’s motherfucking _delicious_. You part your lips and you breathe it in and you could swear it’s a smell and taste and sight, all that _dreading_. 

“Me?” you ask, and your voice is a hiss, your pan is singing and your horns hum and you reach down with your empty hand and twist the sword in your side on purpose, liquid fire through your bones until your knees want to buckle under you. 

 _“Gamzee Makara._ ”

He shudders back from your voice, away from your name like it’s a curse and reaches for his sword and realizes then that you still have it, hold it in your flesh and claim it with your blood.  He’s backing up and your horns are humming, your eyes feel white-hot and you remember the paintings of the ancient church-lords and their blank purple eyes full of dread and smile with every tooth you got in your mouth.

You’re on his back the second he tries to run, grab his stupid elegant back-swinging horns and crush his face on the floor and his yell becomes a splatter and crack.  He thrashes over, throws your hands off his horns and tries to claw at you but you’re on top and you’re not fucking scared and your hands are wet-cold and _wonderful_ and you claw and punch and slam him against the metal by his _weak mewling throatstem,_ again, _t_ he eyes that judged you washed in blood, _again,_ the nose he looked down at you _crunch_ , _AGAIN,_ the mouth that spoke foul blasphemy, oh you could pick out his teeth _one by one_ —

“Gamzee!”

Somebody is dragging you, the struggling body leaves your hands and you spit curses after it, curses on its head from your messiahs above, promises for death and blood.  Somebody’s hands grab at your face and turn you down away from the heretic _blasphemer_ , and you see through your bleary sight little white teeth and angry brows and bright, bright miracle-red eyes.

Karkat.

You drop your club. 

Everything comes back all sudden-like; the pound of pain up and down from the sword in your side, your bloody knuckles, your cheek where he hit you.  Your whole thorax aches from the breaths you're forcing into it, your whole motherfucking body _burns_ but your skin feels all icy cold, so cold Karkat's precious fronds are like white-hot irons.  "You won," he says, and pats your cheek, drags you back down to your ground-bound corpse and your aches and the cold blood on your skin.  "Gamzee, you can stop.  You won."

" _The family will stand for its own motherfucking self,_ " you croak, and your breath is still a hoarse rasp.  " _An insult will be to one as it will be to all--_ "

"I know.  I know, shh."

"-- _for the most grievous damnation and they—and, and they--_ "

"Gamzee."

" _\--brother of my brother and—and s-sister of--_ "

Karkat paps you so hard it's almost a slap, right on your sore face where the asshole punched you.  You get a gasp of air, and your pan clears out a little.  You got purple blood all on your hands.  All down your arms.  You ended up on your knees and Karkat dragged you back, you can see the blood from your fronds smeared over his bright armor like, like paint on gold, fuckin' gorgeous, and over behind Karkat is the guy you were fighting.  He ain't up for fighting much any more.  Might not ever be again.  His face is a ruin.  Your fists might be worse. 

"Gamzee."

Karkat again, callin’ you back down.  You shake your head, try to clear the fog out and Kurloz is dropped down to one knee by you, not touching, watching you with waiting eyes.  He gives you a smile that lights you up like the sun.  You can’t not but smile back.

"Whale, that's the prawntertainment for tonet," says the empress, and the joke in her voice makes you half-laugh and the seadwellers mutter.  "That'll do for the day.  Back to your shuttlefish."  She nods at the twitchy jank-ass body on the ground.  "Get that chum heap outta my sight."

They move around you and you stay down there on the ground on your knees, getting in on yourself, making yourself real again.  Voices go past, whispering at each other.  Legs move around you like this funny walking forest and you slump there and breathe and listen to them talk as they go.  “— _support of the—_ “ folks say, and _“questionable allegiances—_ “ and "you should wash off all that noble blood, _brother_ " somebody says in passing, pretending at concern for you.  "It doesn't _suit_ you."

You look up just in time to get a drink poured over your head.  It runs down your face and you're glad for the sealing done on your paint, because that shit won't move--but some gets in your one eye and it fucking _burns_.  You swear really quiet through your teeth for a couple seconds, and the pain eases off finally, but when you get your eye open most of the way, everything through that side is a motherfucking blur and it stings to meet the air.  Just as well that's the side he got you with that first punch.  Karkat starts up sharp and growls after them, but he comes back down and takes care of you instead and you’re glad of it.

“Didn’t see who it was,” he says, uneasy-angry, and paps you like it’s as much to calm him as it is for you.  Then he growls and shakes his fronds out and gets drops of drink all up in your face.  “Shit.”

“It’ll wash out,” says Kurloz, and he flicks at your horns—you jump and yelp at how it shocks down into your thinkpan, and some of the foggy dizzy in your pan jolts off.  “Come on wriggler, up on your feet.”

“Just give him a goddamn second, will you?” Karkat’s voice is all tight unhappy, and you don’t like it.  You pull him over closer and kiss his forehead—fall crooked at the corner of his eye, up by the line of his hair, the sharp little white teeth at the corner of his mouth, the end of his cute-ass little nose.  He sputters at you and then just gives up and lets you.  “… _don’t push yourself,_ ” he says, and Kurloz growls and turns away rollin’ his eyes up but Karkat’s voice stays quiet for you.  “You…went away for a bit.”

“ _For fuckin’ sure_ ,” you say, and he takes your hands and looks at your bloodied-up knuckles, rubs away some of the blood more purple than yours so’s he can see the torn-up flesh under.   Stings when he wipes at them—you gotta take in a breath and let it out again slow and he looks up at you and leaves your places of hurting alone after that.  His mouth’s a tight little line, one fang’s biting at his own self so hard there’s a trickle of miracle blood flowin’ down from it. 

“Alwaves been hopin’ swimbody’d teach that bottom-feeder a lesson,” says another voice, and you look up and see the empress look down on you.  She got a smile about her, and you hate she’s turnin’ what you did for your kin and family into some dry-ass politics shit but even so you’re too tired to get fucked up over it.

She reaches down to your face, and Karkat moves back away but he keeps his eyes on you and you feel all dizzy and _great._   Holy fuck, you feel _awesome._ You’re gonna pass out.  Or die.  Holy shit you feel awful.  Shit is great.

"…that shit was downright shrimpressive," she says, and her hand holds your face, thumb on your mouth so you can just taste the cold salt she's got for skin and _god_ but you want to bite her, you're twitchy all over.  You want her to give that look at you all the time, like she don't want to be impressed like she is at you.  Want--

She takes her frond away from your skin and you lose it.  Hunch up all tired and worn again.  You could sleep a perigee.

“Scrape your matesprit offa my clean-ass floor, Kurlz,” she says, and smacks Kurloz on the arm.  “G’wan.  I’ll get a big imperial announcement sc-riptide out and send it out to all the dumbasses makin’ noise about you two.  Karkat, bayb, get swimma your guards out there and wake sure no violets decide to get revenge.”

Karkat takes a single second to stop and look you in the eyes once, and then he pulls back, lingering, and stands to salute.  “Your Condescension,” he says, and takes off walking, pulls a little shiny palmhusk out his sylladex, already talkin’ troops and patrols and fuck knows what.

You’re so goddamn tired.

“Come on,” Kurloz murmurs at you, and slides a hand under you, lifts you up gentle and slow onto your feet.  You’re wavering on them, like when you first came from pupation, and he has to keep a hand on you to make you stay up.  There’s greens and blues hangin’ out around the empty tables and shit, staring—you get a wavery pulse of nightmare-fear out of yourself before you give out, and they duck their heads away from your eyes and go for the door.

“Gimme that, bro,” you get to mumble out, and snag a drink off a tray before the greeny carrying it can get past.  He nods and bows and nods and then runs as soon as you got the cup—fuck, you just captchalogued it.  Goddammit.  Well screw it.  You’re not gonna wrestle with your modus to get it out. 

Kurloz and the empress snarl stuff out at each other over your head, but it don’t seem to have a heart behind it and they part on good terms and growls, promising drinks some other time and a quiet spot to talk without everybody hanging on every word and talkin’ behind their hands. 

You don’t get a clear remember of the walk back to the holiest of holies, but you end up there anyway, half walking half leaning and letting Kurloz’s strength carry you on.  Sister and kin on guard at the door try to ask at him what the fuck happened—he waves them off with words to settle their souls and gives them orders, _take us to the sky, children_ and you close your eyes and let leading take you.  Your pan is _aching_ now, your eyes still blur, especially the one the wader trash punched at at the beginning of the fight.  Content to be blind and wandering.  Done with thoughts for now.


	16. Three Steps

You blink back again in Kurloz’s block, because he sets you down at his desk and swipes away his papers to lay you out half lying on it, lifts your arm up away from your side and works his fingers around the wound of the swordblade like he’s tryin’ to figure out where to pull at the shirt first.  You figured out once when you were a wriggler down on homeworld how you could just…tug on your shirt a little and away it goes in your modus, ain’t even a problem and then he doesn’t have to fuck around trying to get it—

The drink you picked up goes flyin’ out straight up in the air, bottom down and top up and spinning round perfect  in the air and your tired hand reaches out without a thought and catches it without a drop spilled.

You and Kurloz stare at it for a second both together, and then both of you bust out laughing.  It’s great, loud laughing, big enough to ring the block, and by the time you’re done he’s leaning on the desk over you, got his eyes watering up at the corners and you’re holding on your side to make sure you don’t get your guts coming out of you.  You give it a touch of prayer and try again in the wake of the laughing, and maybe Smiling Messiah loves you now for your offer of mirth because this time that shit works smooth and miraculous.  You got your shirt off, bitchtits.  Even if laughing has put blood out all over your hand and your thinkpan is gone kinda dizzy and spinning.

Kurloz starts right in messing around with the spot, cleaning and poking and once he puts a big finger right down in and your breath seizes up because _god_ he’s _inside_ you and you’re pretty sure you just gone and found out another sicknasty little thing you like, him reaching down in your insides.  But he don’t keep it there.  Just fiddles around and nods, and then pulls out bandages and starts wrapping them tight at your side, pulls his knots smooth and close around you so the wound’s well shut.  You mess with the cup you stole, still full untouched, and feel the gentle rise in your guts as The Dark Carnival leaves The Condescension, lifts off into emptiness and makes its own down to stand on.  Been a while since you stood on ground as pulled you down all on itself, real planet-ground your feet stuck to without complicated miracle-metal shit whirring away down far below to keep you grounded. 

It brings you wondering, sudden-like, how long it’s been now since you set foot on home planet—whether you’re ever set to again, however long you live.  If your hive’s still standing.  (If your dad’s bones have been picked clean yet, white skeleton-cage on the beach, if that part of him’s gone back to sea like he always did.)  Gets a little… _something_ goin’ in you for a second, as Kurloz walks off to get some shit of a medical nature and all—is that regret?  You regret where you’re at?

…no, you don’t.  Missin ain’t the same as regretting.  You miss that shit but it’s all let go, not held on and bitter-wanting-back.  That was back then, when you needed spoor burning at your insides to keep you from thinking on what hurts, and you wouldn’t go back.

“—shouldn’t be?”

You jump a little bit.  Kurloz is lookin’ at you waiting and you stare at him and come to know he put a question to you and you all not attending.

“…uh,” you say, and then take a stab in the dark.  “…no?”

He laughs and grabs a horn, shakes you around and pulls you over to him.  Well hell, now you’re up in his lap.  Funny how that shit gets hashed out.  Downright miraculous it falls that way so often.

“I said, _that oughta do you right_ ,” he says again, and moves his self back a bit so you got room to slide down onto him.  His room’s got the best stuff in it, you could just curl up between him and soft cushioning pads and go right the fuck to sleep.  But he don’t go to one side so you can get in next to each other; he keeps you up on his lap and looks up at you, smiling a smile you ain’t seen before.  “…you feel anything goin’ on under _these_ …” he pats your side where he’s fixed you up.  “…as shouldn’t be?”

You bend a little around the tight wrap of them, feeling them out—there’s a sting to moving around enough, but you don’t feel that cool-warm spread that means blood.  You shake your head and he looks eased and pulls you closer, closer, lays you out on him.

“…good,” he says in your ear, and sighs on your neck.  “…gave me a fright and three quarters tonight, Gamzee.  Holy messiahs but I swear you did.”

Not much to say at that.  You put your face to his shoulder and sigh a long-ass sigh back at him, like it’ll let out what’s all built-up and trembling in you. 

“…he was talkin’ smack,” you say, and he makes little chirring noises, _I know, little brother, I know._   “—talked shit about—all of us, _you_ , that weak-ass salt-shitting—“

“ _My beautiful boy_ ,” he says close to your skin, and strokes over your hair until you forget the fire that was getting its scorch of your oculars and down in your thorax.  His hand goes from flutter of ocular shield-flap to scalp to fleeting on your horns, down the back to your neck and tugging you a little back all gentle to brush his lips past your ear.   “ _Red-as-flush little one with your bright eyes, all peace and smiles until they touch on your family_.”  His smile is a soft curl against your skin.  “Church, little one.  Bright, good church.”

He does love talking sweet to you and it makes you shiver in your insides, but you know he wouldn’t speak false of church just to make you feel good and your skin is warm from the honor.  Gotta wet your mouth before you can get words out, comes out little and hushed.  “…yeah?”

“Yeah.  Don’t think I ever been so turned on at a dry-ass wader party before.” His hand find the place the sword went through your side, presses in over the rough binding put there—your breath catches and his eyes watch your face, your slack mouth and closing eyes as he plays at the hole, rubbing and pressing until you’re breathing faster and needy, got both your hands over his to push them in harder.”… _that was up on the list of  most beautiful things I ever got a miraculous honor to witness of,_ ” he says, really quiet, and squeezes so sudden and so fucking hard you let out a noise half like a scream and jerk on his hand.  That feels fucking _great_ , balm of pain on your jittery nerves—

“…but I’ll not be greedy just now,” he says, and he lets go. 

The lacking of pain is a fucking tragedy.  It’s a fight not to whine and try to get more from him, but a fight you do win after a good bit of struggle.  Gotta play _smart,_ right?  You can do smart.  Kinda.  Sorta.  You can motherfucking try, anyhow.

“So I made it through your goddamn party,” you say, playing as best you can at a wriggler sulk, still tryin’ hard at breathing even.  “—what you giving for it, motherfucker?  What do I get?”

“You get to beat a wader’s face into a mash right there in front of his fish-gaped trash-heap and you walk away from it fine,” he says, but his lips get a curl on up at the edges like he’s sharin’ a joke with you, his hand is still on your back to pull you closer.  Fuck yeah, look at you all playin’ it smart and totally rockin’ it.  “…ain’t that enough?”

“You didn’t give me that, though!  That I went and took for my own goddamn self.” Goddamn but his fronds are big on your back, all spread out and strong like those great big air-circulation devices the imperial fantagonizers get their use on of—off on that one colony world Chieko trained up on—

 Shit, come on, no, you were doin’ something and this ain’t the time to space out.  Something as is maybe ending in you getting fucked, that is a reason to put soul and thinkpan to it, focus up.  “What do _you_ got for me?”

"Mm." He acts up his thinking face, leans back and has you follow him till you lean into him, till you’re almost face to face.  Takes the forgotten drink from out your hand, sets it down to one side and pulls you a little closer.  "... _I can think of a couple things_."

He kisses you smooth and soft and you're still shaking from the fight and you make a glad little noise into him and just totally slump on him and purr like a wriggler.  He puts his mouth on your mutant little fins where the blade tore through them and you let out an awful whine as makes him chuckle all the way down low in his chest.  You're so ready to just lie here with him and make out and touch him and take all day to get clothes off and fall asleep on him on your hiveship where you're finally motherfuckin' _safe._

Maybe then your pan will stop hurtin' so bad.

"Got a hell of a hornache," you mumble, and rub your eyes--your face feels so hot it hurts.  Goddammit, maybe you caught some awful brineblood shit off that foul-ass gang of false-face jokers at the party.  And here you are with your blood on Kurloz’s hands and kissin’ him like the panless idiot you are. "...fuck,” you say, and he makes a noise like a question in his chitinous wind-tunnel.  “…think I’m sick.  Bet I made _you_ sick."

"I've lived through worse," he says, half a laugh, and shoves you off at the door.  You pretend at growling at him, and he picks up your own drink you didn't get a chance to start on yet and raises it up at you.  "...go get cleaned up, you still got some of this foul slop on you."

"That's mine," you start, but he raises his eyebrows at you and smiles wicked as he raises it up to his lips and you give up.  Your horns hurt too much for this.  What's worse is it ain't...good pain, somehow.  It aches like a sick stomach, all _this is wrong, wrong, wrong._   Fuck, ow.  You don’t _wanna_ be sick.  "Fine, whatever."

"Quick as you can," he pushes, and you catch the gleam of his eyes and hurry off to wash up with a happy little thrill down your spine and shivering in your nook so sweet it almost cuts the pain right off. 

You might miss some bits of paint you get scrubbed off so fast, but you do feel a little bit better after and the sealing stuff you put on your paint is gone so you can just wipe it off later, ain't a thing, gotta get back out there.  You rinse everything, soak your hair and shake it out like a wet barkbeast, pull on a pair of pants (you considered not, but you don't want this over too fast) and back out of his ablutionsblock again in less than minutes. 

"Hey--!" you start, and then...stop a little, because he's standing where you left him but he don't look up when you open the door.  Winces a little at the loudness of you.  You feel your smile fade off a little bit.  (He finished off your drink while you were in there, the asshole.  Well you weren't gonna throw that shit back, for all there was a half a thought in your head of licking it off him because goddamn but that would be the best motherfucking way to get drunk.)  He's got his head in one hand, hunched over like he's tired all of a sudden.

"...hey," you say, a little softer, pull the strings on your pants so they'll stay up and wander over.  "...you okay, brother?"

"...no, I--" he drifts off again, frowning all far-off and confused, and your whole body is drawing up tight, something is stabbing at the back of your pan, _wrong wrong wrong this is_ wrong.  "...I-- _nnh--_ " and he staggers a little, leans on the 'coon and presses his hand at his head. 

You are suddenly, terribly afraid.

"Kurloz?"  You move forward at him, hold your hands up to touch him but pull them away again.  He licks his lips--again.  Again.  Puts a hand to his chest, and his hands are shaking.  " _Brother_ , look at me--"

Kurloz looks up and his eyes are dark pits, all black that's eaten away the purple.

" _Docterrorist,_ " he rasps, dry as paper, sand, stones, _"Krelle_.  _Krelle, get--_ " He drops down to his knees, and you're ice you can't fucking move--

He looks up and sees you, and he doesn't tell you it'll be okay, don't make a try at smiling he takes a breath and he _roars_ at you, " _GET A FUCKING MOVE ON!_ "

You run faster than you've ever run in your whole goddamn life.  You fun with your bare feet hitting the floor as fast as your desperate pusher, you run slamming anybody out of the way that comes near, you run until you're burning and you got no air but you can still see his hand on his chest, hear the noise of his knees on the ground as he fell and you run like the world's ending.

There's six of them in there when you smash through the door to the docterrorists' ward and they jump and pull weapons on your before they see who it is and your bare face and thorax and feet and look to the floor.  "I--Brother Makara!" the closest one to you is already opening her sylladex, getting a look on for paints for you to cover up and they're lookin' down away from you, doin' you a dignity for your unpainted face but you don't have time to care, you grab her and haul her up to you. 

" _Krelle_ ," you pant, "-- _need--gotta get--Krelle._ " 

One of them looks up at you--oldest one there, one of those hundreds-of-sweep kin with old, heavy horns and ancient eyes like they've seen some shit.  Sleeves down over their hands and long, pointy-ass face with paint in neat lines. 

"Who is it?" they say, and they're already reaching for a big black box by the wall when you drop the docterrorist you were holding and turn to them.  "Who's been p—p— _poisoned_ , little feather— _brother?_ Little brother, _where do I need to go._ "

Thank gods and messiahs.  You've run further than the ship's length before, but never so fast and you can't barely get out words but they know what they're needed for and you won't need to explain.  ( _Please let it be enough it fucking_ has to be enough--)  "Kurloz," you get out, and double over, hands on your knees and wheezing.  Holy shit. 

"I don't know that n…name," they say, and grab your shoulder to pull you up again, no shame for your nakedness or lacking of a shirt and no time to care.  Their eyes are sharp like knives, huge wells of purple with pinpoints in the middles, it's like bein' pinned down by a murderbeast from the dark forests on the homeworld.  Freezes you still.  " _Calm town._ Calm down. Give me more than--"

"The _Grand fucking_ HIGHBLOOD!" you roar in their face, and they flinch for the barest hint of a second before their eyes go wide and their lips pull away from their fangs, they start to understand.  God, oh god (don't think about it don't think about it--) "--poisoned, the _Grand Highblood's been poisoned--_!"

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are on high alert. 

Half an hour ago, the Grand Highblood was poisoned in his own quarters.  Fifteen minutes ago, the church called it in to the Empress, saying he was alive but unstable. 

You knew before they told you who the only witness would be.  You still punched the messenger for daring to say it to your face.

You went directly to the Empress with the news, because that's your duty, but you stumble over the words, your hands are shaking and your squawk-blister is clamped in a huge hand.  You know the goddamn clowns have some kind of bizarre attachment to each other, but will their protectiveness stretch to cover this?  You have no goddamn idea, will they protect Gamzee because he's one of their own or will they lynch him because the Highblood--Kurloz, whatever his name is--he's one of them too, and for so much longer?  ( _He could be dying right now your moirail could be dying and it wasn't him, you know it wasn't--_ )

There's a long couple of minutes after you finish relaying the news to the empress where she lowers her face into one delicately-bejeweled hand and doesn't say a word.  Then she raises her head and sighs.

"...go."

The word doesn't make any sense.  You gape at her.

"What?"

" _Go_ ," she repeats, and stands up.  "Go on, get.  You're goin' to the holy fleet."

Every single part of you shivers to obey the order, it's what you want to do, what you _need_ to do but--

"--but--b-but my duty is--"

"--to _follow my coddamn orders!_ " She slams a fist down on her desk, and you see the face of her age for a split second, a terrifying flash of white deep-sea teeth and wide, tyrian eyes, clouds of inky hair.  "I am not in the _motherfucking_ mood to be questseaoned right now, Vantas, what does a bitch have to do to get her _orders followed_?"

It doesn't even take a coherent thought, your legs fold without your intent, dropping you onto your knees, your head to the ground.  "--sorry," you're babbling before you even realize it, "--I'm sorry of course I just--I thought--"

"I don't need _kelping safe,_ " she says, and this time, even though the presumption of thinking it makes your head spin, you can hear the _hurt_ behind the anger and stress in her voice, the...fear.    "I can't glubbin' get to my--to--"

For a second she stops.  The silence is unbearable, weighing down on you like stone, pressing the air out of you, but when she continues her voice is perfectly calm and poised.

"...so you go to who's important to _you_ ," she finishes.  "Be the empire's eyes and ears, little Vantas.  And you _keep.  Him.  Safe._ "

It's only after you've bowed yourself out of her presence, after you're on the fastest imperial shuttle to the holy fleet, that you realize you don't know which of them she meant. 

\--

The clowns do not want to let your shuttle in when it arrives.  There's some panicky kid in charge of the doors and he tells you _we are fuckin' locked down get your bitch-ass heretic self away from--_ and you have to talk him down and give him your imperial ID and proof of identity before he calms down enough to even let you dock. 

You never stop being impressed by the Grand Highblood's flagship, whatever you think of the man himself or his bizarre cult.  There's not even that many purple-bloods in the empire, and out of those purplebloods all of them don't even believe, but there are billions and billions of trolls in the empire and even a small fraction is enough to populate the eight massive floating palaces you're docking to.  They're old and patched, from an older time, but even the ancient design of the things gives them a kind of lumbering elegance and every visible viewport and window is a mess of color that lights up from the inside like stained glass. 

The shuttles you dock next to are a lot newer looking than the rest of the ship, though--clowns don't have much respect for their tech as far as transport goes, and they're always crashing their shuttles into enemy ships to make them whole place explode, or joyriding through hazardous space they're not supposed to go near.  You suffer through trying to dock a brand-new messenger speed-ship into a dock made for ships from centuries earlier, lock your cabin so nobody can get in there and rifle around while you're gone, climb out of your cockpit--

...and slowly raise your hands above your head as a hundred malevolent purple eyes focus in on you with the intensity of a small sun.

"...I'm here by Imperial order," you say, as calmly as you can, and you turn your hand really slowly so the imperial sign on the back of your gauntlet catches the light.  "I need to see my moirail."

There's a shifting at that--a couple of faces show signs of recognition behind the paint, and some of them turn and mutter to each other.

"He's freaking the fuck out, isn't he?" you ask, because it's that or acknowledge the awful fear in the back of your pan.  You remember the way he snapped suddenly at the party when somebody insulted these people, his godawful matesprit--try to imagine what he would do if somebody tried to _kill..._ oh god, shit, this is going to be worse than you thought.  Your voice comes out urgent, ringing through the silent room.  " _Let me see him._   Let me see Gamzee right the fuck now or I swear to god--"

"No need for makin' promises we all might gonna regret, now," says a quiet voice, and you jump.  Everybody does--the voice comes from very close behind you and to your right, from the ladder you were planning on climbing to get out of your cockpit.  It's a troll no bigger than you, tiny compared to a lot of the painted monstrosities glaring at you.  He's got horns that twist like Megido's used to and fork at the end like a snake's, one eye that he squints shut as he looks down at you and smug, smiling paint that doesn't quite hide the worried, angry lines on his face. 

"And don't go thinking we can do this blasphemer any harm either, kin of mine," he says quietly, and you bristle at the tone of his voice when he says 'blasphemer'.  Chew on your tongue.  Keep your stupid fucking mouth shut.  "I think all of us who got our know on of Gamzee Makara know his best and most favorite of scriptures.  His quadrants are...not to be touched."

You almost ask, but then his sharp eyes flick back down to you.  His head shakes minutely from one side to the other.

"You don't have seniority," says a voice from the crowd, and your unofficial spokestroll hisses between his teeth quietly.  "We let no heretic poison into the body of the church, not when our--"

The crowd lets out a soft, angry rattle, cutting off whoever was speaking.  A couple of them bow their head and fold their hands for a second before straightening to look at you again.  Some of them make gestures you don't recognize. 

"I give no orders," says the skinny one behind you quickly, and he spreads his hands, palms up.  You can hear the careful level of entreaty to his voice, a calculated tone of pacification and beseeching.  "But--well fuck now, brothers, sisters, kin--think on this.  If your matesprit, as we have heard by word and seen by deed is their quadrant for fucking sure...if your matesprit was brought right down low--messiahs' watch over our lord--then wouldn't you want your moirail there with?"

There's a murmur of agreement, first for the off-handed blessing and then, louder, for his question.  You want to draw your sickles.  You keep your hands up and do your best to look non-threatening. 

"Then for the sake of motherfucking family.  For our brother."

There's a single long, tense moment where you think it's not going to go through.  Then, slowly, the hostile clowns gathered around you ease back.  Behind you, you hear the one who was arguing for you let out a tiny, shaky breath. 

"...I'll take you to Gamzee," he says to you, quietly, and you glance up at him and slowly lower your hands.  "Keep your head down and don't--just...don't."

"I won't," you say, and you have no clue what you're promising not to do, but you don't think you would have tried it anyway.  "P...please.  Okay?  Fuck, just...please."  The word is damningly weak, even as roughly as it comes out, and you instantly hate yourself—but his face softens, just a little. 

"No worrying now, brother," he says tightly, and you clench your hands into fists and chew on your lip and worry.  "We'll get our fine selves right there.  But he might not be glad to see you."

"I don't care," you say, and pretend the words don't set a tiny, roiling pit of black dread going in your guts.  "Take me there."

\--

“Brother Makara came up right as soon as he noticed something was up and fetched the Untoxxic,” ‘Brother Uderak’ says, as you both duck under a random-ass piece of cloth hanging off the corridor walls, painted in rainbow colors that are almost definitely blood.  “—kin who heals poisons,” he explains, when he notices your _what the fuck you freak_ expression.  “They earned their title _sweeps_ ago, they’re high in the eyes of the church—”

“I get it, I get it.  Royal…churchy poison freak.”  Your hands are twitching, there’s this _whispering_ at the back of your mind like somebody over your shoulder and you fucking hate this goddamn ship.  “Get on with it.”

Uderak’s expression does not flicker.  “They wouldn’t let him back in,” he says, still in that sibilant little whisper.  “I hear he asked them why—but language more salty, brother was well out of sorts—”  He stops dead, glancing around.

“Wh—?” you start to ask, but he holds up a hand and shakes his head sharply.  He leads the way cautiously forward and glances through a big pair of double doors hung with more cloth. 

You come up behind him and glance through, and you catch a split-second view of bright colors, hanging lamps, paintings on all the walls and hundreds of bowed heads before Uderak notices you looking and shoves you hastily on past the doors, leading the way at a very brisk walk away from the bright lights and whispering voices.

“… _prayer vigil_ ,” he says, after minutes of silent, rushed walking, and mutters something too quiet for you to hear, gesturing something with one hand.  You don’t ask.  He doesn’t offer to tell.  “…anyway.  G—“  He catches himself, and there’s a flicker of his eyes back towards you before he carries on as smooth as if it never happened.  “—Brother Makara asked why he couldn’t go in and see his matesprit, as they so recently made known they were and all.” He glances at you again.

“Yeah, I know they’re together,” you say shortly—goddamn he walks fast.  Faster than it _looks_ like he should be walking, it’s like watching a scalebeast slithering.  “I’ve known longer than anybody else, I’m his goddamn _moirail._ ”

You think he twitches a little at the words ‘ _longer than anybody else_ ’.  You don’t have time to care why.  Maybe he hates that you knew something about his precious church brothers that he didn’t. 

“And why did they tell him he couldn’t go in?” you demand, and you know what the answer is going to be by the way he winces slightly.

“…because, they said,” he says slowly.  “…because he was there for the poisoning.  And his hand was stained with that suspicion of guilt.”

You groan and rub your eyes with the heels of your hands.  “ _God._   And did he start crying, start killing or—fucking hell, did he start doing _both_?  Goddammit you’d think you fuckers—hell you’d think _anybody_ —would know better than to say that shit to somebody’s _matesprit_ , especially a goddamn highblood—”

“Brother,” says Uderak, and his voice sounds really chilly all of a sudden.  “…see your own lord and your…mistress, for you…fallen down low of poison with only one in the room with her, see an old friend brought low and tempted by the Handmaid and you try for motherfucking _tact._ Untoxxic knows our lord too well to be all motherfucking _logic_ like you, you unfunny _heretic._ ”

The sudden venom of his voice is startling.  You jump a little, take a deep breath to yell—

\--and stop.  For now.  _For now._   You can yell later, yell later, yell later once he’s led you to your moirail, _not now._  

“…and?”

Uderak is watching you very very sharply.  The sudden anger that was in his face a second ago is gone again, smoothed over by that constant, careless blank stare; you bristle at the way his eyes dissect you, impersonal and hungry. 

“…and nothing,” he says simply, finally, and speeds up again, leading you down a long flight of stairs under hundreds of empty bottles that glow in bright colors.  Goddamn, how much of that awful sugar-water do they drink up here per sweep?  Who even _makes_ it?  “Brother Makara…lost himself in holy rage.  He was brought down.  He was locked away from kin he might do harm on.”  The bottom of the staircase leads to a much darker corridor, lots of heavy-looking doors and few lights.  Your spine prickles; you can smell a strain of something foul and organic, there’s a soft, moaning sigh to the air like far-off voice sobbing at the very edge of hearing. 

“…down _here_?”

Uderak’s lips tighten.

“…we aren’t in the habit of locking up our very own motherfucking _family_ ,” he says, a little bit acidly.  “We got no _luxury_ cells, mutant. And the line of Makara…” he smiles like he’s telling a private joke.  “…they ain’t easy to pin down.”

He threads through the dark hallways, leading you deeper into the maze of dark doors. You’re just starting to bristle up with the creeping suspicion that he’s leading you false when, suddenly, he stops.

“…here.”

The door is the same dark metal as any of the others.  But it’s…decorated.  Pieces of paper and scraps of cloth are fluttering from the surface, scribbled letters.  _Traitor_ read some of them, _poison in the blood of the church._ But even as the acid anger starts to rise in your throat you pin a third, fourth and fifth piece of paper and read, _praying for you_ and _we stand with you_ and _true faith_.

“…you’ll go in?”

“How is that even a question you’re asking?” You drop the paper and glare, and pretend your squawkblister isn’t tight and choked.  “Of fucking _course_ I’m going in!”

\--

Gamzee is far, far gone. 

He’s the first thing you see when you blink into the harsh white light of the room; a skinny figure on the ground.  Pale grey, the darkness of adulthood bleached by the harsh light and the bloodless cast of his sweaty, clammy skin.  White floor.  White walls, white ceiling, white lights.  Black ropes.

They've painted his face roughly--you distantly appreciate the dignity they're trying to give him, when a splash of someone else's purple blood over the paint on his lips tells you he must have put up a fight.  His mask is as pure white as the room around him, and he looks like a goddamn _ghost_ , pale and corpse-like and eerie.  Despite yourself, you falter, standing still, watching him.

He looks up at the sound of your footsteps and _snarls_ , and you see his eyes flicker madly from you to the door and back to you.  You can't see even a hint of recognition there, and your bloodpusher squeezes queasily in your thorax.  They've tied him to the ground at the knees and ankles, kneeling, tied his feet crossed at the ankles so he has no leverage to spring up at whoever comes in, and tied his hands by a short rope to his throat so they're pinned up by his chest, too close for him to get to them with his teeth. 

He almost looks like he's praying, and you would fucking bet the sick fuckers did it on purpose. 

"Gamzee?"  You edge closer; he snaps his fangs. 

" _I'll kill you,_ " he grits out, and he _giggles,_ this sudden, awful crack of his snarl into a sickly grin.  His hands clench into fists in front of him, you can see the muscles in his bare chest and stomach tense as he pulls, straining at his ropes.  They don't shift--he slumps again, panting.  The paint covers the details of his face, a plain, white, featureless mask, but even with the grey of his face hidden you can see the swelling of one cheekbone and both eyes, the purple-black swelling on his skull from his eyesocket to the root of his horn.  One of those is from his fight with the seadweller, but the other one is new--somebody hit him in the face, hard.  You'd bet that was how they brought him down, in the end. 

Your fists twitch in understanding at the thought of him struggling, the knowledge that they _had_ to hurt him like that, they had no other choice.  Your squawkblister chokes tight with pity.

"Your matesprit is alive," you venture--but he doesn't even twitch.  "K...Kurloz?  Kurloz is alive, still."

" _Die soon_ ," he croons to himself, and shakes his head, doubled over almost to the ground.  " _He'll die soon, so will we motherfucking_ all, what the fuck even are we in the end, _WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE--"_ His hands spread and flatten together, and his voice falls down to mumbling.  You catch snatches of words, too formal and fast to be his own--he's praying.  You catch words, _blood and colors and fire and darkness, brotherhood and carnival,_ but his voice is breaking and it keeps easing to inaudibility.

Then the prayer cracks and he's laughing again, shaking against the ground, pressing his forehead to the metal.

"I told him so," he chokes, and shakes his head.  He's leaving smears of white on the ground.  " _Told him so I told him so I told him mother-_ fucking SO _\--"_

 _"_ Would you shut the fuck _up_ already?  Goddammit _,_ you're not listening!" you come closer--you could reach out and touch the tips of his horns.  He snarls, and it's the real, true deep-thorax rattle of an adult, his skin is dark, ashy grey and there are silvery scars striped across it.  Some part of you curls up and whimpers, trying to force you to back off and beg for forgiveness for being this close when he doesn't want you there--but you're still his age, even if you're a freak who hasn't pupated yet, and you bite your lip and settle down there in front of him instead, back straight, shoulders square.  "Gamzee.  _Gamzee._   Now is not the goddamn time for you to suddenly revert to having mush in your thinkpan instead of a thoughtsponge.  Look me in the eyes, _right the fuck now._ "

It snaps him upright.  He glares at you, this great whiplash arc of lean, straining muscle and desperation, and for a second you see the kid you know in his eyes, this desperate, hungry terror.  Then he laughs, his eyes crinkling up shut, and it's gone. 

"Look at you givin' me orders," he says, "--look at the little shitblood, _just.  Fucking.  LOOK at him._ "

"Don't pull that casteist bullshit on me."

" _You don't give me leave to--_ "

"I swear to god I will slap you in the face."

He looks so affronted at that it's almost funny--like a pissy meowbeast. 

"The G-- _Kurloz_...will be _fine_ ," you tell him in the moment he's too offended to argue, and you hope to god it's true.  "They got to him before the poison really set in, and he made himself throw up most of it.  But there was a hell of a lot of it and it's fucking up his pan.  They want you to see him.  See if you can get through to him."

Another flicker--Gamzee's eyes widen, his face creases up with unfamiliar lines of fear and confusion and pain.

"--Kurloz," he starts, aborted and urgent, and doubles over with a terrible, ugly noise of pain.  "-- _fuck--_ "

You dare to come even closer--he couldn't get to you with his hands or teeth, but you're in serious danger from his horns at this distance.  You fucking hope you're getting to him, because if you aren't you might very well be completely and utterly fucked.  The romantic in you sends an entirely idiotic and unreasonable warm shiver up and down your spine.

"He's shouting for you," you venture, and Gamzee makes another horrible noise, longer and worse, like a sob drawn out into a sigh.  "But you... last time you were out, you tried to hurt your...family.  Can you keep yourself on the fucking handle this time?"

" _\--my fault,_ " he says, and his voice is tiny.  "--drink--he--my fucking _fault--_ "

" _Shhhh._ "

"--right there in my hands, it--"

"Gamzee, shoosh." 

He calms a little, but he's still breathing hard and now he's coming out of that weird not-caring place in his head his eyes are filmed with purple and way too bright and wet.  He needs contact.  Needs a distraction.

"Just breathe for a second, you panicky pail-humper," you tell him firmly, and he nods fast and hard.  His breathing is all wobbly.  "I'm going to get up--"

"No--!"

" _SHOOSH._   I'm going to get up and walk three steps, okay?  I'm going to go to the door and talk to somebody outside and then--guess what-- _I'm going to walk right back again._   You can even watch the whole thing, so calm your scrawny barely-existent rumble-spheres."  You snap your fingers in front of his eyes--he jumps and focuses in on you, and he's trying so hard and you want to hug him.  God, such a moron.  "Three steps."

" _Three steps,_ " he says, hoarse and tiny, and his eyes stick on you as you get up and walk deliberately over to the door.  You can feel them burn into your back.

The clown called Uderak doesn't even try to pretend he wasn't listening at the door when you crack it open; he looks up at you without a trace of guilt on his face.  What an asshole. 

"I need water and a rag and whatever the fuck you gross assholes use to get your paint off," you say grimly, and refuse to be embarrassed by the way his eyebrows go up under his hair.  You don't care what they think the paint stands for, for you it's just paint and just something to do with your hands.  But...since you _are_ surrounded by gross-ass clowns...  "...and get me some paint too, grey and white."

"...and his design," he says, and you blink.  You'd been expecting belligerence at the very least, if not outright refusal. 

"I know his design."

He shakes his head.  "Needs a new one, brother, for...a matesprit needing of prayer.  There's signs should be shown.  He won't be smiling no more."

You are coming to the realization there is a vast chunk of your moirail's life you know fuck-all about and really shouldn’t be left responsible for.  You cover up the confusion like a fucking champ by nodding sharply and mumbling something that might sound sort of like _'...thanks._ ' 

"Give me a vial of that miracle blood of yours and we'll call it even," he snaps out like a snare clamping shut, and you flinch and then remember yourself and growl at him.  He doesn't growl back.

"I never asked you to help me," you say sharply, and then remember who's behind you and lower your voice.  "... _There was never a trade! You_ volunteered, _you opportunistic parasitic bulge-sore_!"

 " _You think you could get around this ship without getting splattered over a wall, be my guest,"_ he murmurs back, and you almost start yelling again.

And then you stop.

"... _and how would Gamzee feel if he knew you let that happen?"_ You ask, and you know you've scored a hit by the way his eyes flick past you.  "You wouldn't do that, don't insult me with that kind of transparent bluff."

He holds up his hands in mock surrender.  "Alright," he says, and you're even more pissed off by how easily he yielded on that--what an absolute freak.  "But I figure, brother, that whether you asked or not you ain't the type to rest easy in the cheap seats where the debtors gotta get their watch on from."  He half-smiles.  “—if you was destined for a seat at all, which your heretic ass sure as fuck ain’t.”

"...Karkat?"

Gamzee is shifting uneasily behind you and you don't have time for this.  You glance over your shoulder at his white-painted, wide-eyed face, and then back at Uderak's calculating squint.

"...one vial," you say curtly, and slam the door in his face.

Gamzee lets out a rough sound like a sob of relief when you turn away from the door, and you come back over to him and edge as close as you dare, rubbing your fingertips cautiously over the places where the ropes rub against his skin.  They haven’t tied them too tightly, and you’re grateful for that at least; his skin is purple and sore from the friction of his constant struggling against them, but the ropes don’t dig in and there’s no broken skin.

“He’s okay?” is the first thing he says.  “You—you said—he—?”

“Still alive,” you say, and he seems to notice the grim tone to your voice.  His face falls—shit.  You pap his face and squeeze gently at his raw wrists and he shivers and settles a little.  “No Gamzee, shoooosh, _shh_.  He’s not dying off any time soon.  I wouldn’t say he’s…okay.  But he’s alive.”

Gamzee makes another one of those awful, sobbing noises and bows his head—flattens his hands together in the ropes and murmurs something incoherent and trembling.  You catch the words _thank you thank you_ fuck _fuck god thank you_ and for all you don’t even like thinking about his religion, the wretchedness of his voice makes a pang of pure, agonizing pity shoot through you.  How in the name of every fake fakey bullshit messiah ever invented can anybody believe _he_ did this?  You will fight every single one of them if you have to, you will _kill_ them if they try to hurt him. 

You’ve been sitting with him for no more than ten minutes, shooshing and petting and catching him up on what little you know about the situation, when all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door.  You jump, and then remember you sent away your gross, prying clown guide to get you stuff.  Right.  You should.  Probably get up.

 This time Gamzee doesn’t make a fuss about it when you stand up, although he does twitch when you pull away and you can still feel his eyes on your back.  You turn back and smile at him really quick, reassuring, and then fix on your darkest glower and pull the door open.

Uderak is standing outside, hands in the pockets of his oversized pants, perfectly at ease in the dark, awful hallway.  “Everything you need,” he says impassively, and with a little ozone-scented _pop_ his modus spits out…an envelope?

It drops into your hands and you stare at it—try to tug at the seal a little.  You might as well be trying to tear a rock in half with your bare hands.  You glare at Uderak, who is watching you with an awful, smug look on his snakey little asshole face.

“You have to whisper it a secret,” he says complacently, and you loathe his punchable pointy nose in an utterly platonic and kind of frighteningly bloodthirsty kind of way.  “Secret Message Modus, brother.”

“Fuck you,” you say firmly, and try to walk away with the envelope and close the door in his face.  You get about a foot from him before suddenly, as abruptly as hitting a stone wall, the envelope _refuses_ to move.  You stop, tug against the sudden resistance; it doesn’t budge.

“…gotta open it here,” he says, still watching you. 

“Anything _else_ I should know about your godawful modus?!”

“…keep it out for more than a minute and the card explodes?”

“Holy fucking god.”  You take a few deep breaths, wracking your thinkpan, and then glower at him and lower your face to the envelope.  “… _I don’t know why I haven’t pupated yet,_ ” you whisper, as softly as you possibly can, and the envelope gives an encouraging shiver in your hands.  “… _and I’m freaked the fuck out that I never will._ ”

The envelope pops open.  A sealed tub of warm water, some miscellaneous tubes and bottles, a set of paint-pots like the ones you’ve seen Gamzee use…you sort through them and then pick up the last thing in the envelope and look at it.  It’s a sheet of paper with a frowning face meticulously drawn on it.  Very, very plain, just a frown and sad eyes, with a single teardrop painted down from one eye in an elegant line.  You look a little more closely—the teardrop is a delicate, upside-down heart.

Uderak takes out another envelope—this one he holds up to his own mouth and whispers inaudibly into, and he pulls out a little glass jar and a wicked little device that looks like a needle on a tube.

“Hand,” he says, and when you balk a little, repulsed, “… _you owe me_.”

Reluctantly, you hold out your arm.  He pushes your sleeve briskly up to your upper arm, presses his thumb into your elbow once or twice, and—

“—ow, fuck!”

He doesn’t bother to apologize.  The little tube fills with hideous mutant scarlet; the jar is filled and then stored with a gleeful little smirk you would _love_ to cut off his face. 

“…right,” you say—well, snap.  Well, snarl, maybe.  “ _Now fuck off and leave us alone_.”

“No need to get your horns in a knot,” he says brightly, “I’m goin’.”  And then, just as you start to turn back to your moirail—“—tell Gamzee—I don’t know who did it.  But that’s a secret I’ll dig out for him, I’ll—”

Your back prickles with sudden, irrational anger of a completely different strain from the one you were just feeling.  What is that, is that supposed to be _comforting_?  That’s not his job and Gamzee’s not his and it’s not _his_ job to make sure everything turns out right for him, for _your moirail_ —

“Tell him yourself,” you say, through teeth that try to snap, and slam the door before you have time to think about what a moron you’re being.

Gamzee is still shaking and clammy when you get back to him, but he looks at you surprisingly sharply considering how out of it he was a few minutes ago. “…who was that, best friend?” he asks, small and hoarse, and you grit your teeth.  Some of your anger drains away just from the need to take care of him, goddammit it makes you shiver inside just thinking about how much he must have been hurting to drive him that far off in his pan. 

“Some fucker called…U…Udderk.  Ud—”

“Oh,” he says, and you’re weirdly gratified to see him roll his eyes.  “…fucker can’t keep his nose…out of other folks’ business,” he gets out, almost steady, and you can’t hold in a snort because _ha_.

Not ‘ha’ anything in particular, just… _ha._   You start in getting your stuff together so he can’t see the triumphant, stupid look on your face, unsealing the water container and pulling apart the stack of rags.  The cloth feels rough compared to some of the cloth you’ve been working with since you started working for the empress herself, but you know it’s still a hundred times finer than anything you would have had as a lowblood wriggler on the homeworld and you wonder idly where they came from.  Handtowels?  Do they have whole sections of on-ship laundromassacres?  Are these made specifically to wipe off a clown’s face-paint, or does this weird-ass blood-caste wipe off their nutrition plateaus with cloth worth a year’s credit allowance? 

Who the fuck even knows.

You make sure the water isn’t too hot before you do anything else, because you can still remember the first time you stayed overday on this awful ship and Gamzee got in the ablution trap after you.  The howling when he stepped into the water—first shocked, then an uncomfortably breathless high groan—still haunts you, and the blisters and soreness lasted nights.  You made him take off the bandages for you and take care of himself on camera every day before you both headed to the ‘coon, and okay, that was pretty awesome and you might have acquired a little bit of a kink for long-distance pale-care.  But you don’t want to burn him if you can possibly help it.  Coldbloods.  So fucking delicate.

“This is going to be hot,” you tell him, but he just lets out a soft moan as you touch his face, leaning into the contact like he’s desperate to be soothed.  Even in the midst of all this dramatic bullshit, some bit of you reserved just for him curls up and purrs.  He’s so desperate for you and you are a terrible person for loving it so much when he gets like this. 

“ _…close your eyes,_ ” you say, and you feel like the star of a cleaning porno but he takes deep breaths and tilts his head down and does as you say and maybe you don’t mind.  You’ve always liked the pale porn better than the bucket quadrants anyway.  You trace your cloth gently over his eyelids and he flinches and then eases into your hands, all lanky, shaking limbs and bowed, knobbly back.  They painted his face, but didn’t bother to put a shirt on him ( _well_ , says a part of your brain fairly, _he was trying to tear their heads off_ ) and his back is painfully, pitifully thin under the broadness of pupation, shaking with every inhale.  You keep up a gentle litany of words as he rocks back and forth, letting you clean his face; _shhh-shoosh_ and _there you go_ and _breathe, bulgemuncher, in, out, in…_

“…this is the paint they said you would probably want,” you say, when you’re finally done scrubbing off the hastily-applied white mask, and he jumps a little and opens his eyes to smile blearily at you.  His eyes fall on the picture you’re holding up; his expression stills and darkens. 

“…yeah,” he says, and his voice breaks just a little.  “…yeah, that’s—yeah.  Fuck…”

“Shhhh.”  You kiss his forehead and he chews on his lip and frowns and blinks too fast.  “Shh, you’ll see him in a little bit here, calm your tits.  It’s going to be _motherfucking_ fine.”

-

The door isn’t locked and Uderak isn’t there when you come out, but Gamzee knows the way around plenty well to lead you up and out of the awful cell corridors.  He holds on to your hand as you walk, and you don’t pull away.  His legs are so shaky from being tied in a kneeling position for hours, he has to lean hard on your shoulder sometimes to stay upright.  His breathing is a harsh rasp.  You pity him so hard you can’t breathe.

"What did they paint me before?" He asks eventually.  The concentration of talking clearly makes his control over his body waver—he staggers slightly.  You keep your hand tight on his.  "What face did I show at you when you came in?"

"There wasn't a face." You see him frown, confused, and hurry on--better not to confuse him right now.  He's shaky enough as it is.  "They didn't give you one.  I think you bit one of them and they couldn't keep painting, they just left you with the white paint."

His hand tightens in yours so hard you wince.  "All white," he repeats, and gives an awful laugh.  "... _all white_ , huh?  Funny shit, best friend."

"Why?"

For a second you think he's not going to answer.  When he does, his voice is strangled and hoarse, and you know with awful certainty what his face looks like, how fast he's blinking and the way he pins his lip in his fangs to keep himself from breaking down.  " _Because,_ " he says quietly.  " _With all my fighting to get to Kurloz..._ all they could get to me to paint on was a goddamn death mask."

There’s nothing you can say to him to help.  You squeeze his hand back, and he sighs long and low and reaches up with his other hand to touch the tiny heart painted on his cheek like a tear.

“…He’s gonna be okay,” he says, and he sounds so awfully, terribly young.  “…right?”

You don’t have an answer.

\--

Gamzee doesn’t even bother to go to the mediculler bay to look for Kurloz—maybe there’s some kind of clown protocol that you aren’t privy too, but he goes straight and unwavering down long hallways and up flights of stairs and only stops when he finds a block with a plain, unmarked door.  He leads you in, hesitant—the room inside is sparsely-furnished and dim and quiet, full of empty seats with a small shrine in the corner that throws off faint shards of rainbow light on the walls and ceiling.  You can hear a distant raised voice, and you look up and realize it’s coming from a door at the opposite end of the room—just as plain, but considerably heavier-looking.  For the first time, Gamzee falters.

“… _Fucking hell,_ ” he says, so quiet you can barely hear him.  “—Karkat, bro, I—I can’t fuckin’ do this.”

“Yes you can.”  You keep hold of his hand, come around in front of him and reach up with the other hand to lay a palm on his face.  The paint is a familiar, waxy smoothness under your fingertips, and you wish you didn’t have to make him do what he _has to do._   He has to, and you know he’s terrified but none of you have a choice.  You pull him down—he puts his face in your shoulder and kneels down, and even kneeling he doesn’t have to stretch to put his head on your shoulder, but he feels so fucking small.  “Listen, you paranoid whiny wriggler.  This whole thing licks copious amounts of waste sphincter.  But pretending it’s not happening isn’t going to make him feel any better, and no matter what you’re _thinking,_ it won’t make you feel any better either.”

“ _I’m scared._ ”

God, god god god.  You have to take a deep breath.  “—I know.  You can be scared.  That’s okay.”

“ _—what if—he never—_ ”

“ _Shhh._ ”

He squeezes you so hard you have to struggle to breathe in, and his breathing shudders.  He’s not crying, but you almost wish he was. 

“We have to go see him,” you say, and he whines like a wriggler and fists his hands in the back of your uniform.  “I know, but you don’t have a fucking choice.  He’s _out of his pan,_ Gamzee, he needs something he cares about and he—” you have to swallow hard on the words—they almost hurt to say.  “…he…he does care about you.”

 It takes him a long time before he can pull his face away from you and lean back, and he’s breathing hard like he’s run miles, blinking too fast but he’s not crying.

“Okay,” he says, and it cracks and he winces at the sound of his own voice.  “…let’s just.  Let’s just—motherfucking do it.”

\--

The room is plain inside, and there are lamps around the walls but they’re all dark except one.  You thought it was dim in the waiting-room outside, but in here there’s just enough light to see. 

Kurloz—the Grand Highblood, _whatever,_ he looks fucking _awful._   They've tied him down--you don't like the man in any way, shape or form, but it still turns your guts to see the way he twitches and twists like a dying animal.  He's babbling and jerking, eyes wide and freakishly black, and as you come through the door the indistinct noise you heard through the door clears and you can tell what he’s saying.

"-- _whole team to the next level down,_ " he orders, and there's a ragged, torn edge to his voice and you know he's been screaming.  Howling at people nobody else can see.  "He's here, we'll find him he's--fucking--"  You step forward out of the doorway, and the light spills into the dark room--he strains away from it, squeezing his eyes shut, baring his teeth.  Behind you, Gamzee makes another awful, tiny noise.

" _Steady_ ," you tell him quietly, and he gropes for your hand and squeezes it so hard your eyes water.  Your bones creak but don't give.  God you're going to be black and blue after this...

The old poison expert looks up at the two of you as you come in, and their face brightens slightly. 

"Finally," they say, and shift over to one side, opening up a spot; Gamzee walks forward like he's sleep-walking, one shaky step at a time, and his grip on your hand is so tight you couldn't hang back if you wanted to.  He stands at his matesprit’s bedside, looking down on him, not breathing, eyes wide.  The adult looks slowly from you to Gamzee and back again. 

“He’s wonder—one— _wandering_ ,” they say.  “If I had to g-guess, I would guess he’s reliving the mission that he personally l…l-led a few perigees ago.”  Their eyes flicker up to Gamzee’s face.  His eyes widen.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he says, half a sob.  He opens his mouth to say more—stops, mouthing silently, and closes it again.  “— _aw—_ fuck, _no, no no fuck—_ ”

You remember the nightmares, the bad days, the breakdowns like the one you first calmed Gamzee out of, you remember what little you’ve ever managed to work out of him about the nights he spent in the hands of the dissensionist movement that captured him, and Gamzee shudders all over and stares at his matesprit’s face like it’s the only thing that can save his life. 

“The poison was _meant_ to send him walking off to the Carnival in mind, and then off in b-b-body too,” says the poison Docterrorist, and picks up a cloth from the Grand Highblood’s forehead, concentrating on their hands and not looking at either of you.  “He had three conv— _convvv…_ ” they stall, take a deep breath, and try again.  “—three con _vulsions_ —but he’s t-tougher—than your average troll by fair.  By far.”

“How the _fuck_ did this even happen?” You demand.  They look up at you, blank-faced even behind their paint, unimpressed by you and everything you stand for and you try not to let it show how much that stupid look _pisses you off._

“He inchest—in _gested_ it,” they say, and hold up…an empty cup.  It looks familiar.  “It was—in-in a drink.”

"It burned," says Gamzee suddenly, and you jump--he hasn't raised his voice that loud since you calmed him down out of whatever sick headspace he went when they took him away from his matesprit.  "--some fucker dumped a drink on me after I won my fight at that stupid fuckin’ party and I got this shit, face felt like I was fucking _burning_ and all."

"They weren't fucking around," says the Docterrorist absently, and rings out the towel.  "...they gave him twice enough to kill him--but he threw most of it back up before it could sink in." They dip the towel in cold water and fold it neatly--the Grand Highblood hisses, gasping in dry, fast breaths, as it touches his face.

" _Water,_ " he demands again.  His lips are dry, cracked at the corners.  " _Give--_ ” The Docterrorist picks up a bottle of water, almost gone, and trickles it carefully into his mouth and he coughs and swallows convulsively. 

"You should be glad it was him who drank it," they say impassively, and Gamzee draws a sharp, small breath.  "If you'd drunk the entire cup like he did, you would have been dead by the time he noticed something was wrong with you.  And I'm sure a lot of other people would die as a result." Their eyes flicker to Gamzee's hand, hovering by his matesprit's twitching fingers.  "...I don't think he would have taken it very well," they say dryly.  "Do you?"

Gamzee doesn’t answer.  His eyes are dull and dark with horror.  You edge closer to him and push him a little bit forward and he jumps as his fingers brush his matesprit’s and then winds their fingers together and squeezes. 

The…what was it, Untoxic?  Stupid title—looks back away from Gamzee, back to the Grand Highblood’s sweaty face.  His paint is smeared and even messier than usual, so bad the skeletal grin is almost blurred out of existence.  His eyes are rolled up.  He pants hoarsely through his mouth—his lips are cracked and awful. 

“…well,” they say dryly.  “You know what words get whisk—whi-- _whispered_ of me and my blessing of p-poisons, little Makara.  He’s lived the f…first hours after, so I’ll have him up again.  By Messiahs’ blessing.”  (“Amen,” Gamzee echoes back, fast and automatic as rote.)  “They got prayer vigil up in the chapel.  You not going?”

Gamzee shrinks a little.

 _“…still figure_ I _did it,_ ” he mumbles, and that protective anger wells up in you again at the way he says it, and at how slumped his shoulders are.  He looks exhausted again all of a sudden.  “—how’d I go to vigil with all them figuring I went and—”

“ _Goddammit_ ,” the Grand Highblood mumbles, “— _you ain’t skipping out on vigil,_ get your ass moving.”

You all jump and stare down at him— but he just  takes another wheezy breath and shifts in his straps and then goes still again, apparently done talking.  Gamzee’s face goes through a series of emotions you have trouble placing, but you recognize fear, hope, relief, fear again, sadness and then a sort of grim, shaky determination before he drops his face in his hands and scrubs carefully at his eyes with shaking fingers. 

“ _Yeah_ ,” he says, really quiet.  “… _thanks, big brother._ ”

Somebody knocks on the door.

“Roe-pen this goddamn door before I break it down!”

You snap to attention at the sound of the voice before you even realize why, and then jump all over again when you realize why it’s familiar.  The Untoxxic frowns at you as you rush over to the door, but you ignore them—you have duties to attend to.

The empress sweeps in like a tidal wave, bringing glittering gold, the smell of salt and a _lot_ of hair.  You bow; the clowns do a considerably less respectful sort of deep nod. 

Her face doesn’t shift in the slightest when she sees her Grand Highblood strapped, shaking, to a table.  But you think you see her shoulders go tense.

“Cod-damn,” she says blankly.  “—they reelly glubbed him up, didn’t they?”  And she reaches down, grabs him by the shoulder, and gives him a little shake.  “Kurlz.  Angler.  _Kurloz_ , what the glub.”

Kurloz—the Grand Highblood (You keep catching yourself thinking of him by first name, which you aren’t even supposed to fucking _know,_ thanks a shitload.  But it keeps creeping into your thinkpan anyway.) doesn’t react the first time her Condescension shakes him, but the second time he stirs and groans and the third time he opens his eyes and looks up at her.  For a second or two he just stares, all bleary, obviously not comprehending what’s in front of his face.  Then he smiles.

"Meenah," he says, and laughs, a stupid, snorting, wrigglerish laugh.  "How'd--hehe, _water_ you doin' here?"

The Condesce's mouth twitches, but there's still a furrow between her brows.  "Lookin' after you, you old reprobait," she says, and taps the tip of his nose with one fingertip.  He pretends to bite at her fingers and laughs again.  "You went and got yourshellf poisoned of all glubbin' things."

He laughs, starts to say something--it comes out a garbled mess of too-fast words, like everything is piling on top of itself trying to get out of his mouth first.  It's a load of bullshit and it doesn't make any sense, but he laughs at himself like he just told the funniest joke in the world.  Gamzee's miserable frown twists painfully into half a reluctant smile.  Your pusher twists up at that look on his face, your hands clench tight.

And then, sharp as breaking glass, the laughter stops.

"Where is he?" the Grand Highblood demands, and every trace of humor is abruptly gone.  "Wh's happenin'.  _Meenah_."

“We’re movin’ in on them right now,” says the Condesce, and you’re impressed despite yourself by how fast she manages to go from teasing to playing along with his feverish pan’s delusions as fast as a flipping caegar.  “You been brought low, Kurloz, stay down.”

" _No,_ " he rasps, and strains to pull free of the straps around his arms, trying to sit up.  "...gotta be there, I..."

His voice trails off as he slumps back on the bed, not straining at the straps anymore.  His eyes are following something in the air that nobody else can see, and Gamzee's smile is gone again. 

"Been like that since I got there," says the docterrorist, and wrings out another cold rag to put on his forehead.  "Makara, give him some more waver.  Water."

Gamzee jumps up to do as he's told, and immediately his ancestor's eyes snap open, the twitching in his hands turns into a vicious, writhing strain as he struggles to claw at you all gathered around him.  " _Stop it stop it fucking_ stop--!" He snarls and his eyes are wide and looking far away.  "-- _don't you touch him again_ you foul-ass motherfucking BLASPHEMOUS _CARRION--!_ "

He thrashes again, the buckles and straps holding him down creak and whine and everyone but Gamzee steps back a little bit.  A second later, the fit is over again--he slumps, breathing hard and shuddering, and his eyes focus on here and now, flicking from the roof down towards his body and back up to the face hovering over him. 

"... _Gamzee,_ " he says. 

Gamzee is shaking all over.  For a second you don't understand why but then he grabs his ancestor's arm, shaking him roughly.  "Kurloz,” he says hoarsely, and his voice is a cracking, panicky rasp.  “—what did you see?  Stop doin' what, _what did you see_?"

But Kurloz just looks confused, blinking his bleary black eyes.   

"You were yelling just now, you--you were--"  Gamzee's breathing is a harsh rasp; you catch his shoulder and pull him back. 

"He doesn't remember."

"But--!"

" _Gamzee._ He _doesn't.  Remember._ " You shake him a little bit, until his eyes focus on you.  "It's fucking with his pan—hell, I don’t even know if he really knows we’re here."

“ _Gamzee,_ ” says the Grand Highblood again, and you can _hear_ his voice wandering away again, see his eyes falling shut.  “… _’zee…_ ”

And then he’s gone again, breathing shallow and harsh, showing nothing but a slit of pure-black pupil and thin threads of purple.  The Untoxxic glances over at you and Gamzee, down at the Grand Highblood, back up at Gamzee.  Gamzee looks awful—he’s shaking again, his eyes are watering, he keeps sniffing and blinking and you remember all of a sudden how long he’s going to live, how young he still is for a highblood.  Might as well be a goddamn wriggler. 

That doesn’t mean you’re okay with him starting to cry, though.

“ _Gamzee,_ ” you say quietly, and his ancestor echoes the name faintly after you and Gamzee’s lip trembles.  “God.  It’s okay, shoosh.”

“… _not okay_ ,” he mumbles, and he has his face turned away from his church elder and the empress like he can’t bear for them to see and his voice cracks on the words.  “—Karkat, best friend, this is the _most fucking not okay_ —”

“ _Shhh,_ shh—”

A sob breaks out of him—you keep him turned away from his ancestor’s unconscious body and he doesn’t see the way the noise makes the Grand Highblood shudder and bare his teeth, tensing in his weird half-sleeping daze. 

“We’ll catch whoever did it,” you promise him, and he squeezes you again—you thoracic cage is going to be black and blue, goddamn.  “We will.”

“Def-fin-itely,” the empress says distantly.  She’s still looking down at the Grand Highblood—you can’t see her face, and you can’t read her voice.  “Yeah.”

“I volunteer for—” you start, but all of a sudden your palmhusk beeps.  Gamzee doesn’t seem to notice as you pull it out and stare at it, keeping your hand on his hair.

 

 _abstersiveDetoxifier_ [AD] _started trolling you_

AD: She is paxxifying you, pupa.

AD: She knows better than to interfere with our invexxtigation.

AD: The church will find the answers it laxx without the help of heretixx.

CG: FUCK YOU, IT’S MY JOB TO TAKE CARE OF WHATEVER FUCKS GAMZEE UP AND HE WAS LITERALLY *ALMOST POISONED*.

CG: SO SHUT UP.

AD:  I will. 

AD: When fools no longer axx quexxions they do not want answers to.  X….X

 

You glance up at the adult sitting at Kurloz’s bedside; they look up at you in the same moment, and there’s no malice in their face, just…nothing.  They could fucking care less what you say, what you do.  You don’t _matter_. 

You’d rather they sneered at you.

“…come on, Gamzee,” you say, and he follows you without a word, lets you lead him by the hand.  “…let’s…let them get on with it.”

He resists for a second only as you cross out through the door—he stops, dragging at your hand, not looking up at the Condesce or the Untoxxic.  Leans down as his matesprit shivers and growls, and kisses Kurloz'schapped lips gently.  Then he puts his head down, scrubs at his eyes with one forearm, and walks quickly out of the room into the light beyond.

You follow him out and find him pacing, cursing to himself, trying to get rid of the tears that are trickling down his cheeks.  He dabs at them so carefully to keep his makeup from getting any more smudged and it’s stupid and he’s stupid and you love him and he’s hurting.  You settle down in one of the big, soft seating stubs and hold out a hand.

“Gamzee.”

He shakes his head—sniffs hard.

“Come here.”

He wants to keep pacing, working off the nervous energy, but you can see every lap making him more and more nervous and eventually you just snag his arm as he comes near you, pull him down and settle him next to you.  The noise he makes when you nuzzle into his shoulder and rub his horns is a moan of relief and helplessness, every second of fear and stress weighing on him like stone.  You crawl onto his lap where your body heat can weigh him down, press yourself up against him and work your thumbs hard into the sensitive scalp around the bases of his horns until he's shivering and breathless and the tears on his cheeks have started to dry.

" _Sleep_ ," you order him, and he closes his eyes and does as he's told.

\--

Your palmhusk tells you it's ten hours before anybody comes out of the room.  You spend some of it coding on your palmhusk, some of it sleeping, some of it soothing Gamzee's nightmares with carefully-timed sleepy hornrubs, and some of it chatting with your clade from the homeplanet.  You can't tell any of them what happened of course--Imperial secrets of the highest degree--but you let some of the more trustworthy ones at least know that something happened and Gamzee's upset about it.  Nitram goes into an outpouring of brown _uh_ s and _um_ s and worried frowning faces with big horns.  Sollux makes fun of you for flying to the aid of your palemate like in a goddamn romance novel.  Eridan accuses you immediately of being _pitch_ for the egregious poisoned shitlicker in question, which is ridiculous and you shout him down immediately and at great length.  Terezi says yes, she knows,  and doesn’t use a smiley face.  You only get to talk to her for a few seconds before she tells you she has to go and abruptly signs off.  You try not to feel too bad about that, and are surprisingly more successful than anticipated, although the stupid, pointless ache in your thorax is still there. 

And then just as you’re closing your palmhusk, the door opens. 

The poison specialist comes hobbling out, leaning on an excessively curly, wobbly, _“_ mirthful” staff with horrible little round things hanging off the end.  When one of them swings to face you, you grimace into Gamzee’s hair; it’s a pair of dried heads, dead mouths stitched into an exaggerated smile and frown.  The eyesockets have been filled with dull purple gemstones.  It’s horrendous. 

“And it can crack a heretic skull,” says the doctorturer blithely, and when you jump and look up they’re looking at you.  “You can tell brother Makara when he wakes up that He’s stable.”  There’s no point to asking who _He_ is—you can almost hear the emphasis scaling on the first letter.  “He’s unconscious for now.  He’s still h…hallucinating when he’s awake.  W-when I asked if his matesprit was reson—re—responsible for poisoning him, he told me if I hurled—hurt ‘ _the most precious goddamn thing as ever happened to me_ ’, he would hurt me back.”

Goddammit, this asshole needs to stop doing things you appreciate right the fuck now, you hate him and you don’t want to be grateful at the same time.  Gamzee shifts up against you slowly, and you pet his hair and don’t look away from the adult’s eyes.

“ _None of you are going to hurt him,_ ” you say, and it comes out deeper and harsher than you mean, almost adult.  “ _It wasn’t fucking_ him _and you’re not going to hurt him._ ”

“…no,” they say.  “I don’t believe I will.  And if my word is healed—heeded—nobody else will either.”  They frown.  “…but I am not Grand Highblood.”

“I’ll fight every single goddamn one of—!”

“Save your breath.”  They finally look away, and it feels like you’re being released from something, like something was squeezing you and only just let go.  “…I…spoke rashly.  When he c-came to the block with me.  I do not sssssuspect my little brother.”  For a second their eyes flare and it’s the eerie, inlit purple that glows sometimes in Gamzee’s eyes.  “… _but the guilty ones will be frowned—f-found by church.  And_ destroyed _by church._ ”


	17. I'll Find Them

Gamzee cries himself ugly and sick that morning, curled up in your arms in his ‘coon and shaking all over with the force of his sobs.  You hold him and pet his hair and let him cry until he falls asleep, and he has more nightmares than he has since you were first quadranted, just after his first disastrous mission.  He shakes and snarls and sobs in his sleep and when you wake him up he just cries again until he falls back into his nightmares—wakes, cries, sleeps, dreams evil dreams, wakes to cry again over and over until he’s too tired to dream and too tired to cry—until he lies like a corpse.

When he finally wakes up for real he’s miserable and shaky and sick.  You think he’d still be crying if he were even still physically capable.  But he’s cried out, and you help him up and help him to the ablution block and clean the sopor off him while he stares at the water through his weird half-seadweller eyes, not blinking, motionless and just barely breathing.  When you go outside his block for a second to check how full the halls are, there’s a muddy mess of blood on his door in the shape of a scowling face, and you captchalogue the mess of it and rest your head against the metal for a second, breathing slow and trying to keep your teeth from grinding.

Gamzee is standing in front of his wardrobeifier when you come back in, staring forward, not moving, eyes distant.  You put a hand on his arm—he blinks and looks slowly down at you.

“…come on,” you say, and push him a little.

“Why?”

He blinks down at you, and you stare at him, mouth hanging open.  The question doesn’t make any sense.  “What?”

“… _why_.”  He looks back ahead, and everything about him is a tired, miserable line.  “What’s out there for me?”

“Goddammit.”  You reach up and put your hands on either side of his face, turn him toward you.  There’s an awful, dull look in his eyes.  “Gamzee.  You can’t just stay in your block.”

“Can,” he says, really quiet.  “… _I don’t wanna go out._ ”  And when he looks up at you there’s a dull, pleading desperation in his eyes.  “… _don’t make me go out there, love._ ”

And you, you idiot, you don’t push.  You put an arm around his shoulders, help him lie down and he lies still as you pet his hair, as you rub the pads of your fingers over his neck.  You clean up trash from the floor of his block and let him lie in the sopor, and once in a while when you come over to check on him his eyes are open, and there are slick purple tear-tracks on his cheeks. 

It’s a few hours after that first attempt to wake him and Gamzee’s sleeping again, shivering but mostly calm, when his husktop pings at you. 

It’s open—you lean in and look without thinking, and a picture pops up on the screen when the cursor hovers over the screenname, and you see a familiar, smirking face, curled horns that split at the end like slitherbeast tongues. 

You read.

_sinuousTormentor [ST] started pestering you._

ST: …brother?

ST: not theeere, huh?

ST: well maaaaybe that’ssss to be expected I guesssss?

ST: I jussssst

ST: I jussst wanted to say I’m sorry, brother, I’m ssssso *fucking* ssorry?

ST: no

ST: no goddaaamn quirk, for once in my goddamn life I’m not assssking.

ST:  I’ll find them, brother.

ST: I’ll *track them the fuck down*.

(And then, after a long, long pause as you stare numbly at the screen.)

ST: …sssstay ssafe?

He might as well have put a wistful little half-diamond on the end of the goddamn chat-log. 

For a second your data-selection pixel-group hovers over the _chat history_ button.  You want to _know_ , you’re in a strange place and Gamzee belongs here and you don’t and there are so many people all around him who know this part of him better than you ever will and this little piece of shit could see him any time of any night—

And then you shake yourself awake and shut Gamzee’s husktop, hating yourself a little.  He’s your _moirail_.  He’s your moirail and you trust him now more than you ever have, and it’s you who went into that white room and brought him out again and it’s you who helped him when he fought with his matesprit. 

And if you want to know, goddammit, you’ll just fucking _ask._

You go stomping over, thinking so hard you’re scowling—Gamzee twitches at a particularly heavy footstep and when he cracks his eyes open groggily and looks up at you he seems to shrink a little, huddling in on himself.  You take a deep breath and force your expression to even out.

“Your creepy prying snake-hate-friend is trolling you,” you say, would-be-casually, and he blinks and then sighs—not unhappily, you think, and your guts twist up.  He sits up a little in the slime, too, which is good, but it’s because of that asshole, which is bad.  “He’s…worried,” you say, like somebody poking at an infected wound to see how much force it’ll take to send pus and blood everywhere. 

Another sigh.

“Are you going to answer him?”

He blinks.  “…why all sudden-like, best friend?” he asks, and his voice is weak and thready and you feel really awful for a second about pushing him on this, but it’s _important._   “He’ll bide.”

Well that’s—that’s _good,_ but it doesn’t help much.  You take a deep breath, different ways to say what you want to say presenting themselves and immediately being discarded, and then finally, blurt out, “—Gamzee, I think he has a crush on you.”

Gamzee blinks at you.  “…huh?”

“He’s just so—fucking _concerned_ and he keeps trying to reassure you about shit and he’s—” ( _not a mutant-blooded anomalous freak, one of your_ family _, got some kind of connection with you I don’t understand, cunning, caring, scary as fuck_ ) “—just acting really weird, okay?”

 “—no c’mon brother, look real at this shit, he ain’t—“

“I think he is.”

“He knows I got you!”

“Yeah, but it’s not like he cares, is it?  Doesn’t fucking _think much of me_ , does he?”

Gamzee frowns at you—his eyes wake up and sharpen a little, which is a relief.  “What?”

“It’s not a secret or anything everybody on this ship thinks I’m a piece of shit.”  You shrug—he winces.  “No shoosh.  I’ll prove it to any asshole who doubts me, I’ve _got_ this shit.  But you can’t deny there are people who think you shouldn’t be with me.”

“They can motherfucking _suck it_ ,” Gamzee snaps, and then blinks and colors, mumbling something and making a gesture you don’t recognize, _forgive the ill-speaking of my kin_ —“—I’m not leaving you, best friend, I wouldn’t ever!  He knows. He motherfuckin’ knows.”

You remember Uderak’s sharp snake eyes and his calculating gaze on you, and frown.  “…he kept _pushing_ me about you,” you say, and your voice sounds small and unhappy to your own ears.  “…he keeps pushing and calling me a heretic and getting pissy when I know stuff about you he doesn’t and trying to get me to pass on messages to you and—I—I just—”

Gamzee softens a little, and you sniff and hate the burning in your cheeks and your eyes and the tightness of your throat.  “Hey now,” he says, and leans out of the slime to reach out for you.  His fingers are slick with slime and they slide easy over your cheek, trailing numbness and warmth in their wake.  Fucking hell but they sleep with strong stuff on this ship.  “Brother _shooosh_.”  He watches your face a second, then sighs and leans against the opening of his ‘coon, cupping your cheek in his hand.  “…he wouldn’t,” he says, “…but if he does, you know what I’ll do, I’ll tell him to fuck off.  I already got what I need.”  He smiles wanly, but with a hint of mischief in his eyes and you know that look—you should put a hand over his mouth but you get there too late and he turns his head so your hand paps sloppily against his cheek instead of quieting him.  “—diamond of mine.”

“Shut up,” you say, but your voice cracks and he smiles.  His thumb traces the line of your cheekbone, the scar that cuts across it. “Shut up you corny suppurating mess of wet clown-worshipping hoofbeast shit, don’t you _dare_ —”

“ _Palest love,_ ” he croons, and pulls you closer , close enough you can lean up on your tiptoes and let him kiss your lips gently, bump the tips of your noses together.  “ _Sugar-sweet little sun-star, what’s a motherfucker to do without you lighting up the way—_ “

You shove him back into the slime, face burning, blood-pusher pounding in your throat and eyes watering, and he comes up laughing, more alive than he has been for more than a night.  Fuck, if you can keep him that way you’ll be embarrassed the rest of your life, you didn’t realize how much you missed his smile until you saw it again. 

“You are an embarrassment to existence,” you inform him, and he smiles softly and traces his knuckles over your cheek. 

“And you’re beloved of me, motherfucker.”  He yawns, and his eyes are bright, not as bright as they’ve ever been but brighter than they have been recently.  His hand comes back to your face and traces your lips and you realize abruptly that you’re smiling at him like a lovestruck fool.  “… _forgot,_ ” he says, very, very quietly.

“Forgot what?”

He doesn’t answer.  “…It’s gonna be okay, best friend,” he says instead, and his hand stays gently moving on your face, his fingertips trace every plane and angle and old scar.  “Me and you, and you and me together, we’re all gonna be just motherfucking okay.”

“Too goddamn right.”  You say, and he yawns and stretches.  “…are you ready to haul your skinny ass out of your pod now?”

He considers that for a second, and it makes some of the numb hurt come back into his eyes but he’s not sinking in it like he was before.  You think he can keep his head up.  (You hope to god he can keep his head up.) 

“…there’ll be…some as…” he hesitates, rakes his fingers through his slime-spiked hair and sighs.  “…I was…the only motherfucker there,” he says finally, slowly.  “…they’ll think I—”

“But you know they’re wrong.”

“But they’ll be _thinking_ that of me!” He groans and clenches a hand in his hair, twisting and tugging absently at the sopor knots, worrying his lip as he thinks.  “Thinking I’d hurt him so and then come out among them a traitor, they’ll think I—”

“Hey!  Hey, shhhh, shoosh.”  You grab his wrist and turn your face into the palm on your cheek—he shivers when you kiss the inside of his wrist, his palm, his fingertips like a goddamn prince of romance.  He looks agonized, like he wants to give in for you but he can’t figure out how to let go, and you pity him in an aching, acid way that makes your eyes hurt and your jaw ache to bite someone.  “They’re going to think what they think whether you’re in here or out there.  But if you’re in here all by yourself, the ones how actually _like_ you—which, hint, is most of them, can’t get to you because you’re too busy hiding from the assholes who don’t understand serendipity!”

His hand pat your cheek a few times and you blink and realize he’s staring at you, looking faintly alarmed.  “—what?”

“Shhh.”

“I’m calm!” 

“You ain’t.”  He slides his hand down and touches the vulnerable hollow of your throat and you shiver and then feel your pulse pounding a little, a soft flutter pinned under your skin by his fingers.  You reach up to feel for yourself—your pusher is pounding fast and hard.  You take a deep breath and realize the ones you’ve _been_ taking have been small, angry and fast.  Gamzee’s fingers stroke up and down your neck and you meet his eyes and deliberately let go of the tension in your shoulders. 

“…no,” you say, when you can make your voice even again.  “…I guess I’m not.  Fuck.  It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense!  You’re— _grossly_ flushed for each other, like, it’s fucking _disgusting_ how sappy you get, and—I know, I know.  Calm.  I’m calm.  I’m going to be fucking calm.”

He winces a little when you snap at him, and pulls back the hand that had started anxiously papping your cheek when you got loud again.  “…sorry,” he says, and his voice is smaller again.  “…I know, ‘s your job.”  He smiles and it’s that smile that does it in for you, because when his pusher’s not in it Gamzee smiles more unhappily than anybody you’ve ever seen.

“…no,” you say, and reach out to grab his hand before he can pull it back away from you under the slime.  “No you idiot, of course it’s not just _my job_.  I—there—there has to be a balance here.” You take his hand and spread it out, press your hand against his palm to palm and his fingers are more than a whole joint longer than yours, his palm dwarfs yours and at your touch his cheeks flush purple and his mouth softens into a genuine smile and god that’s all it takes to send him melting, falling right apart.  Yours.  “There has to be you taking care of me and me taking care of you you idiot, of course you want to take care of me, of course I _want_ you to—t-to take care of me.”  (Goddammit where did that stutter come from get it together Vantas).  You slip your fingers a little to one side and thread them through his and he squeezes gently, settling his big hand around yours. 

“…yeah?”

You smile, and the look on his face makes it worth how stupid you feel.  “…yeah.  Moron.”

\--

You have to leave him eventually.  You’re not just his moirail, you’re the Grand High Threshecutioner (youngest ever, first mutant, the broken records go on and on) and when her Condescension calls you back for an emergency debriefing you have no choice but to go.  You leave Gamzee sitting up and smiling, make him promise to troll you every day and any time he feels bad, and that’s the most important thing.

You’re spoiled as hell, because as you march in and take up your station at Meenah—at _her Condescension’s_ —shoulder, and you’re still wishing you had Gamzee’s hand there in yours to calm you down.

“Sit, bayb,” the empress orders absentmindedly, and you follow orders without so much as a thought, sinking down into the chair with your back straight and your hands on your knees.  “Good.  Now, let’s get ‘em in here.”

The first time you’d been confused—there aren’t any chairs in the conference block, where were all of them going to sit—but just like that time the empress claps her hands and little transmitters around the conference plateau light up.  Screens light up in the air, finned faces flickering all around you.  The empress leans back, folds her hand on one knee, and smiles with her perfect white fangs all bared to the gum.

“Shello y’all,” she says.  “Talk to me about this shit.”

They all look around at each other—nobody wants to be first to answer.  You think about your moirail and clench your hands into firsts in your lap, out of sight of the group.  (You think of a tall, broad, lean figure arching and twisting and strapped to a platform and hate how easily he was brought down—)

(you stop thinking.)

“…I feel,” starts one of them, finally, “…that we are not being allowed to explore every option, your condescension.”

“Mm.  Explain that to me, buoy.” The empress cocks a fin, and as your eyes fix on it you get hit by a sudden, painfully vivid and extremely inappropriate memory—darkness, cool hands on your ass and cool fin-membrane against your lips. 

Stress, you remind yourself. Stress.  Increased libido or some shit.  Fuck, it’s just _stress._

“There are…individuals close to the purpleblood who haven’t been questioned yet,” says the general who dared to speak up first, and his eyes narrow meaningfully at his buddies.  They all make vague noises like they agree, maybe, if somebody’s going to be saying it first.  You hate them all.  “…very close.  It’s traditional to question the quadrants of—”

“This is about my Grand Highflood gettin’ his bass poisoned,” the empress says sharply.  “You wanna bring his quads into this, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, guppy.”

The seadweller looks slightly pained at “guppy”, but soldiers on on his voyage of stupidity and pointlessness. 

“It was…recently made public that your majesty’s Highblood was quadranted to a…a barely-pupated _wriggler_ who has not proven his loyalty and hasn’t even been questioned in this case.”  He glances down, typing—Gamzee’s fleet identification image captures appear on the screen.  They must be from just after pupation; his eyes and sweet, sleepy smile are slightly distant with the fatigue of the transformation and there’s the barest edge of a crisp white bandage wrapped around one shoulder.  You feel eyes turn to you and keep your eyes trained directly ahead, keep your face blank and your mouth shut. 

“I see no need to quest-sea-on the Makara buoy,” says the empress dismissively, and you feel a pang of gratitude lance through you.  Her support means a lot, more than you think she understands.  “There’s bigger fish to fry here.  Bigger shit to figure out.”

“I’m not sure how much there is to figure out,” says one of the generals, and crosses her arms.  “—the wriggler seduced him…somehow—” and the little sneer on that word as Gamzee’s smiling face hovers on everyones’ screens makes your fists clench to punch something.  “—and then tried to make his power-bid while he was in the good graces of—”

"No."

Everyone goes still.

" _No_ ," the empress says again.  "You efin listen to what I just said?  Wasn't little Makara.  But I figure we're seapposed to _think_ it is."  Her eyes flick over the other faces at the table, past a bruised mess of bandages in the corner—the seadweller Gamzee fought at the dinner.  Your fingers are itching to get out your sickles and do what Gamzee started that night, finish what you stopped him from doing--but her Condescension's hand is tight on your leg, so tight you can feel yourself bruising, and you bite your lip and hold still. 

"...because he'd take a cup, wouldn't he?" she raises her voice to the whole table.  "He wouldn't ever take so much as a ship from a drink one of you bottom-feeder's gave him, but if it came from little Makara buoy, whale.  Alla you motherglubbers heard about those two, din'tcha?"

“Then the need for care and caution is very clear, “says Lord Hayden, “—especially when discussing who would target the Grand Highblood himself—”

“…unless the boy himself was the target,” says a sleepy voice.  The Condesce’s fins flick, her eyes narrow.  Across the room, a seadweller with hooded eyes and long waves of dark hair blinks back at you from his screen.  You’ve seen him around.  Pretty sure he’s training Eridan, but even though he’s kind of a slimy bastard at least he won’t take Eridan’s shit.  It might do him good.

“You wanna keep talkin?” the empress demands.  “You ain’t got the best raycord, Bloodless.”

“I ain’t got the best raycord in battle,” the general agrees, and the way he repeats the empress’s clipped, badass way of talking sound ludicrous.  “But I didn’t get titled for my skills in battle, your murderousness.  I deal in intrigue and…” he hesitates for a split second, and his lazy face shows no sign of emotion, no flicker of something readable.  “…betrayal.”

Her Condescension’s face is just as blank—her left fin twitches, so slightly even you can barely see it, sitting next to her. 

“…go on.”

“Your Condescension,” somebody else starts, “—we have seen this kind of ill-planned lowblood squabbling a hundred times before, is it necessary to—”

The Empress blocks the rest of the screens without even looking down.  On the only screen left alight, The Bloodless inclines his head, so indolently it might almost be him nodding off to sleep.

“There is constant displeasure with the Grand Highblood among your seadwellers, your Condescension,” he says, and your empress sits back and steeples her fingers together, considering him.  “—but with the recent interrogations and the body count being turned out by the fleet inquisition, I believe the court is keenly aware that trying to, _ahem_ —” and oh _god_ he actually makes enclosure talons with his fingers in the air.  “… _take the sugar-swilling dirt-lickers down a peg_ …is a dangerous endeavor.  If a coup was to be attempted, I’m reasonably certain whoever planned it would seek strength in numbers, and they psychics have not found a hint of suspicion in their mass scans, as you know.”

“Ain’t to spray they wouldn’na done it anywave,” the Condesce points out, “—all the psychics we got are landdwellers, they can’t get entirely inside.” 

The general bows his head. “Of course, your pearly luminescence is entirely correct.”

“I sweir to cod,” the empress interrupts, “—if you don’t stop callin’ me dumb shit I’m gonna get you whipped, I don’t even caviar.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“…care,” amends the empress.  “That shit was weak.” 

“…it is true that we might be looking at one reckless troll’s attempt to bring low your—Condescension’s…church supporters,” The Bloodless says, with exaggerated caution.  “—but please also consider this; the perpetrators knew that Makara and the Grand Highblood would attend the occasion, when in fact they had every reason to guess that he would not.  The perpetrators poisoned several drinks at an imperial ball, and _were not caught._   The perpetrators poisoned _nobody else._ ”  He shrugs.  “…in fact, they were very careful,” he says absently.  “…careful enough, as you know, we have not even been successful in identifying the source of the poison they presumably bought for the endeavor.”

“Gamzee said somebody poured a drink over him at the end of the party,” you say suddenly, and the general jumps and looks at you, raising his eyebrows over his half-shut eyes.  “He said it made his face burn, made his eyes go all blurry and his head hurt and shit.  Nobody else got poisoned—”

“…so why the fuck did the only two poison drinks at the whole party sand up with little Clamzee?”  The Empress sits back, tapping her lip with a thumb.  “…huh.  But who wants _him_ dead?”

“Panless over there who he beat the shit out of,” you point out, but the empress waves a hand vaguely.

“—don’t eel right to me,” she says.  “—baysides, like shell he woulda picked a fight if he was pullin shit like that.  Nah, this needs remora panmatter than he’s got.”

“Has anyone asked the, mm…” the general pauses for a second, and you see his eyes flick to you.  “…boy?  If there’s anybody who’s been unduly aggressive toward him?”

“Gamzee?” You have to snort.  “—Gamzee couldn’t tell ‘unduly aggressive’ if it tried to strangle him.”

The general shrugs and yawns.

“…my opinion, my lady.  An isolated event, aimed at the boy, not the Grand Highblood.”

“Noted,” says her Condescension, and claps her hands—the other screens flicker back on.  The other seadwellers look pissy and uncertain and kind of scared.  Shit’s _awesome._   “Alla you gonna go get your pans checked.  You and all your lords and ladies and shit who work under you, I want alla you _checked,_ got it?”  And then she smiles.  “… _if you don’t find me somefin in two nights,_ ” she says, almost gentle, “… _I’m turnin’ it over to the_ clowns _._   Dis-glubbin- _missed.”_

You stand at attention on instinct and bow.  The seadwellers on the other side of the screens bow as well, and one by one they flicker out.  The Empress sits back in her chair.

“…whale whale whale,” she says thoughtfully, and for a few minutes she’s silent.  Then she shakes her head slightly and glance sup at you.  “…you do that tomorrow night, nubsy.  Ask your moray-eel a coupla questions.”

“Yes, your Condescension.”

She grins and pats your ass—you resist the urge to squeak and jump—and sits back in her chair.  “…but first you gonna re _port_ to my block today.”

Your insides shiver.  “…yes, your…condescension—?”

“No underweir.”

God the shock never ever wears off.  You manage through sheer grubfuck willpower to keep your face steady and not make any eager whimpering noises, but you still feel your cheeks heat up and your voice cracks just a little.  “Y—yes, your condescension.”

“Good buoy.”

It’s better than a goddamn medal.

“Thank you your Condescension.”

“Okay, get goin’.” She stands up.  “I got…places to be.”

\--

Gamzee reacts exactly like you expected him to.

“No!” 

You’re sitting in his block again—you’re getting more and more familiar with the place, the faygo bottles with lights in them instead of good, normal white lights or fancy tyrian lanterns, the mess on the floor, the huge luxury ‘coon.  If this crisis keeps you on _The Dark Carnival_ much longer, you’re going to be more familiar with Gamzee’s block than you are with your own.  ( _More familiar with the empress’s block than you are with Gamzee’s_ —)  Gamzee used to be sprawled on his group-accommodating comfort stub, picking at the cushions—now he’s staring at you, defensive and tense.  You sigh.

“I just need to know if anybody—”

“No,” Gamzee says again, and you can see him going on the defensive.  He doesn’t get stubborn very often, but by god when he does—  “Not a fucking soul, not my fam—”

“I’m not dissing your weird clown family!”  You talk over top of him—shift a little bit in your chair, but the aching doesn’t go away.  Goddamn, it feels like somebody’s been punching you all over, the empress didn’t go that hard on you, did she?  (she did, but the muscle pain isn’t just in the places she had you using and you’re not thinking about this right now, goddammit.)  “I’m not saying they _hate_ you or anything—” (you are, that’s exactly why you’re asking) “—I just want to know if there’s anybody who’s been mad at you recently.  At all.  Just trying to figure out a pattern.”

“They wouldn’t hurt him.”

“I know.”

“Wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I _know._ ” You pet his face—he thins his lips and doesn’t soften for you.  “Gamzee.  Come on.” And you see it in his face, the flicker of guilt, the answer he’s not giving.  “…I know you’re thinking of somebody.  I can _see_ you thinking of somebody, come on, don’t fucking hide this from me, I _need to know._ ”

“…I…got…” he stops—he’s fighting himself, you knew this was going to be hard but it still hurts that he can’t tell you openly.  His hand twitches up toward his throat, and when you look closer you see just the hint of a bruise, a fading stain of purple-red and darker grey.  An _old_ bruise, days at least, something from before the party, and it wraps around the sides of his neck like a strangling-wound, not like the little patchy bruises of bitemarks.  He sees you looking and flinches, and you know you’re getting to the heart of it.

“Who did that?” 

His eyes skitter off to one side, and he is awful, he is such a fucking awful liar.  “…Kurloz,” he says, too late, too small and miserable, and goddammit but it’s your fucking _trust_ in that asshole that makes you shake your head.

“He wouldn’t choke you,” you say firmly.  “It’s too scary for you and too dangerous for him and not painful enough for either of you.  Try again.  And don’t insult me by lying this time.”

He slumps.

“…just…old friend of his,” he says, and the word _friend_ shakes just enough to hear.  “Figures I ain’t worthy, but he wouldn’t, not him.  Not my family.”

“A ‘friend’?”

Gamzee flinches like you threatened him with a slap.

“… _drone-season pailmate,_ ” he clarifies, voice tiny.  “Said he’s still holding on, Kurloz says, he says, even though he let that shit fall on back behind a long time ago—”

“What’s his name?”

Gamzee’s shaking, there’s a strange, drawn agony to him but you can’t stop now you’re _so close_.  “Best friend,” he says wretchedly, “—you can’t—”

“ _What’s his name_?”

“You’ll do wrong by him, I won’t be the hand that—”

“Even if he tried to kill you?”

“He motherfucking _wouldn’t!_ ”

“He _MOTHERFUCKING DID!_ ”  You reach out a hand and dig your fingers at the fading bruise and he tightens and makes a choked sound at the pain.  “Or did he just try to strangle you out of _brotherly love_?!  Your matesprit is unconscious you piece of shit, he’s tied down so he can’t hurt himself and he is fucking— _screaming_ for you, and I’m trying harder than you to figure out who put him there!”

The shock and hurt in his face is a stab in the guts, but he’s _wrong_ and you’re getting a name.  It’s for his own good.  It’s for his _own good._  

“ _Give me a name._ ”

\--

You leave Gamzee hunched in his block, head in his hands, to find Halore Travye.  You tried to comfort him—he shook your hands off, didn’t answer your voice, and there’s an awful, sick horror in your stomach but it’s overridden by the steely determination throbbing in your pan and the constant, distracting ache through your bones.  You’ve got this.  You’re going to—

“Karkat!”

You think for a second Gamzee has run after you—but the voice is too high, rougher than Gamzee’s low, quiet drawl.  You turn, and see a wide, pointy smile, a pitch-black coat with searingly vivid scarlet lining and a bright teal sign worked into the chest.

“Karkat!”Terezi says again, and comes to a halt in front of you in a flurry of black coat and red lining.  “Grand High Threshecutioner, I expected you to be…” she sniffs the air. “…taller.”

“Shut the fuck up,” you say, but you’re still strangely breathless—excited?  Holy shit, you think you might be legitimately excited, and without the dread that usually seems to come with excitement.  “You got fucking huge, that’s all.”  She did, too; she’s not nearly as big as Gamzee but you have to look up at her.  She’s at least half a head taller than you, horns like needles and hair down to her shoulders.  She’s still wearing the glasses.

“Pupation didn’t…” you gesture at your own eyes—she sniffs again and then laughs.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”  She giggles again for a few seconds, then sobers.  “…is this Gamzee’s room?”

  1.   “…yeah,” you say, “—but you shouldn’t go in there, he’s…not happy.  With me.  With anybody.”



“But I must,” she says frankly.  “I need to interrogate him about possible enemies that would—”

“Halore Travye.”

She jumps a little.  You think she blinks at you behind her ridiculous fucking glasses.  “I beg your pardon, mister candy-red?”

“Don’t call me that.  Halore Travye, he half-strangled Gamzee the other day because he used to be pailing K—the Grand Highblood, and now he’s pissed off a kid like Gamzee is doing it instead.”  You cross your arms and don’t think about Gamzee’s face as you wrenched the words out of him, as you forced him to say the name.  “…the Grand Highblood went into a rage when he heard what happened.  Gamzee distracted him, saved the guy’s life.  I can imagine he’d be pissed off for owing something he already hated.”

“Oh, very well done,” Terezi says, and smiles grimly.  “—have you never been told to _wait for the legislacerators,_ Mr. Vantas?”

“Nobody else could have got that out of Gamzee,” you say stubbornly.  “Nobody.  Not by asking _nicely_ , not by demanding, not even by fucking _torture._ ”

“Yes, I have heard how difficult our Mr. Grape Jelly would be to interrogate,” Terezi says brightly.  “The traditional slapping stage might not be exceptionally effective!  That is neither here nor there.”  She pulls out a palmhusk and holds it up to her ear.  “Bring in my team,” she says, and all of a sudden her voice is all grim business.  “We have a quarry.”

\--

You find Travye’s block easily, with the combined authority of the empire and the Cruellest Bar backing you.  People don’t want to give you answers, but in the end they do and they lead you up to the top levels of the ship, the adult blocks for elders and captains and schoolfeeders and everybody else important enough to be lined up for a Title.  You’re all for pounding on the door, but instead Terezi pushes you to one side and raps on it sharply with her cane. 

“Imperial business!” She calls out, and her voice sounds bigger and older than she is.  “Open this door in the name of justice!”

Halore Travye is…big.  Bigger than you expected, which is kind of stupid but hell, you knew next to nothing about this guy except the Grand Highblood once filled a couple pails with him and apparently the Grand Highblood’s taste runs to skinny pailbait like your moirail.  But Travye is heavy set, more like you than Gamzee.  But taller.  _Way_ fucking taller.  (Although….there’s something about the tired eyes, the simple paint, his wavy horns…he does kind of…look just a little like…)  Travye’s face is set and exhausted, haggard.  His paint is less than precise, slightly smeared around the eyes.  He looks…pretty awful.  Not like a troll whose plan has gone right.

...well.  He wouldn’t. 

His eyes flicker from you to Terezi and back again.

“Sir,” says Terezi, spins her cane and clicks it down.  “We must ask you to come with us.”

“Do as you got a feeling like you motherfucking _must_ ,” he says, very quietly.  “At service of her condescension’s threshecutioners, that’s how our duties go, for fucking sure.”

That’s…strange.

“Nothing to say to defend yourself?”  Terezi’s voice is sharp and curious. “You are far less vocal than is usually anticipated, _brother._ ”

“My reason for fighting is gone,” he says expressionlessly, and his eyes look right past you.   “Do as you got a feeling you must.”

“We have reason to believe you hold negative feelings toward a certain member of your church,” Terezi says, and you blink at the phrasing but keep your face as blank as you know how.  You want to reach out and strangle him.  You chew the inside of your cheek until it bleeds and keep your hands to yourself.  Travye looks from Terezi to you and back again, and for a long moment he doesn’t answer.

“…I suppose _Gamzee_ sent you,” he says finally, and the way he says his name is sharp with something you can’t quite read—anger, maybe, but also hurt, resignation, fear? 

“Brother Makara was forced to confess your name against his will to the inquisition of the empire,” says Terezi coldly.  “He defended your innocence…emphatically.”

Travye’s eyes flicker.  His ears are long like Gamzee’s, finned like Gamzee’s and it’s terrible to recognize the same sharp flick of sudden confusion and distress, the flaring fins from the sudden shock.  You’ve seen Gamzee do the same thing when he sees you hurt, when he doesn’t understand your mood, when he’s trying not to cry.

“ _Like this asshole deserves it,_ ” you mumble, and Travye’s face tightens, impassive behind his mask of paint.

“Gamzee thinks so,” says Terezi evenly.  “Apparently he is insistent that his family would _never_.“ And here her voice gains an edge of imitative sing-song, repeating back what you told her of Gamzee’s desperate defenses, the weak shield of trust and loyalty he put up as you tried to force him to give you a name.  “… _never-ever-EVER._ ”

“Don’t you fucking _mock_!”

That makes both of you jump, although Terezi hides it better than you do.  Travye withdraws again almost immediately, but his eyes are a little more awake, slightly more alive. 

“…of the things I judge on…brother Makara,” Travye says, and you can’t parse the way he says “Makara”, strange and tight and full of emotions you can’t understand.  “…his loyal pusher ain’t one of them and is _not_ a thing to _fucking judge._ ”

Terezi doesn’t even glance at you, but you can almost _feel_ her make a decision.  “We will bear this in mind,” she says.  “You have the privilege by station to contact your quadrants, should you so choose and should they be living and not far-the-fuck-away, as written verbatim in the lawbook.  Do you confess?”

He draws himself up, and for a second there’s a spark of dignity and authority in his eyes.  The familiar tickle of _back down back down holy shit it’s an adult BACK DOWN_ runs up and down your segmented cartilage column—you stomp it down.  “I would fucking _never,_ ” he says, and it echoes a little in the corridor, booms like he’s preaching one of their terrifying, bloody clown sermons.  “I would never do what you come here to accuse.”  He looks you right in the eyes, and his gaze is a challenge.  “… _not to either of them,_ ” he says, and you know he knows Gamzee told you the whole story—the accusations, the chokehold, the history.  His eyes bore into you. 

You look away first.

“…arrest this troll,” you say, and your voice comes out sounding sweeps too old to your own ears, aged and tired.  “…on suspicion of treason.”

Travye doesn’t put up a fight, and Terezi’s team aren’t assholes about it—they don’t shove or laugh or anything.  Terezi is very quiet the entire time.    The only sign she’s paying attention at all is the soft sound—soft enough you’d miss it if you weren’t standing right next to her and listening for it—of her soft sniffing. 

You wait until the team have led their prisoner out of earshot before you say “…well?”

Terezi doesn’t look at you (why the fuck would she?) but she cocks her head to one side a little in your direction, which is as close as she gets. 

“Well?” She echoes the word back at you.  “The prosecutor never reveals her suspicions first, Karkat.”

“Is that a law you learned in batshit legislacerator schoolfeeding, or did you make that up to fuck with me, you insane throbbing _waste_ of my patience?”

She laughs, a little distractedly but still with the same stupidly adorable giggle-snort you remember.  Some part of you—something soft and hot and wriggler-silver—turns over softly and painfully in your chest.  But it’s no more than that, not anymore.

“…I made it up to fuck with you,” she admits, and taps her cane thoughtfully.  “You’re getting almost as good as a legislacerator at sniffing out lies, Mr. Cherry.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

She sighs. 

“…I…do not think he is guilty,” she says, and she sounds slightly reluctant to admit that such a thing is possible, but you know what she means.  All the signs are there—a motive, knowledge of the Grand Highblood’s movements, a powerful position of influence in the church…but he doesn’t feel right.  You keep remembering the look in his eyes, and some part of you repeats over and over again _not him.  Not right.  Not him._

“…me neither.”

\--

Travye only has one quadrant currently filled when you look into it—big surprise, he’s quadranted in-cult.  He has a palemate, a few dozen sweeps older than him—you send out an imperial summons to her, but you think by the time she gets it she’s probably already on her way because it takes less than a half hour for her to come storming into the room. 

It’s a woman, barely a few heads taller than you with hair that sweeps low to frame her face in front and stands up in short, wild spikes in the back.  Her eyes are red-orange with fury as she looks at you—you can almost hear her teeth grind, and you try not to imagine how you felt when you came onto this ship after the poisoning, when you asked about Gamzee and they looked back at you and you were _so fucking scared—_

“ _It wasn’t him,_ ” she hisses, and you remember the same words snarling out between your clenched teeth no more than two nights ago and it’s strangely, intensely painful to look her in the eyes.  “It wasn’t.  _Him._ ”

“That remains to be seen,” says Terezi blankly.  “You have ten minutes.”

You watch them through the glass, even though it makes you feel like a creep.  They don’t say much—Travye has his head in his hands, his moirail’s arm around his shoulder and his eyes closed.  After a while of sitting in silence, Travye raises his head a little and glances over at her—she scratches the back of his neck and smiles.  Her hands are shaking. 

“…how is he?” he asks, muffled through the speakers, and she sighs. 

“They say he’s alright.  Healing.” 

Travye nods and rakes his fingers through the tight, thin braids of his hair, and his moirail rubs his back and you remember the look on Gamzee’s face when you forced the name out of him and you feel like you’re going to be sick.  He is never _ever_ going to fucking forgive you.  You’re the worst.  You’re the _worst._

Travye looks calmer, by the time Terezi strides in and tells his moirail she has to go.  She glares at you as she walks out, and it strikes you weirdly how her eyes are still the same furious red-orange.  How if anything, she looks even more pissed off.  If Travye treated all his quadrants like he apparently does this one, no wonder she’s the only one he’s got left.  You’re amazed she’s stuck with him.  But hell, you’re not going to question it.  You have no right now that you’ve fucked up your—

Ignore that thought.  Useless thought.  Useless self-loathing.  Save it, Vantas, save it.

“…one more night until her Condescension turns the case over to the fleet,” you say absently, because talking is better than brooding, and Terezi goes _mmmm._   You turn back and look at her—she’s frowning.  “What?”

She doesn’t answer for a long second—when she does, her voice is distant.  “…in the business of law, we are not encouraged to… _doubt_ the most obvious possible suspect,” she says, almost as though she’s talking to herself more than to you.  “…but I feel as though I am one step behind on something and believe me mister strawberry, it is _maddening._ ”

“Join the fucking club.”

She giggles.  You were just in the middle of congratulating yourself a little bit on how bitter and badass that sounded—the noise makes your ears hot in advance.  “ _What_?!”

“I knew you had picked up some debauchery from living on a ship with these depraved cultists,” Terezi says, and you can see her trying to keep herself professional—she’s not very good at it.  Her voice keeps wobbling.  “…but I did not know that this ship was equipped with a fucking-club!  Tell me, where is it held?  Are you the star of the show?”

“Fuck you!”

You shove her—she doesn’t shove you back and for a second you feel like a dumb, immature wriggler—before her cane comes from out of nowhere and swipes your knees out from under you.

“…I will take another step back from the problem,” Terezi says, upside down like a small moon eclipsing the sunlight of the lamp above you.  “I will spend tonight trying out…” she twists around so she’s sideways to you.  “…different angles.”  She taps the top of your head with her cane.  “Ping me more often, Karkat.  We’re all losing track of you these nights.  Do make an effort to keep in touch.”

You open your mouth, but before you can find the words to answer she’s gone, a click and rattle of sharp little shoes and nested bludgeon-cane on the tiles of the _Dark Carnival_ ’s garish corridors. 

Well, no fucking point lying around here in an empty viewing block all day.  You pull yourself up (couldn’t even stay to give you a hand, goddammit, not that you’d trust her to take your weight if she did) and set out, palmhusk in claws, to seek out further orders.


	18. Taking Care of You, Taking Care of Me

The next night, the empress turns the case over to the subjugglators.  They have their orders, _don’t kill unless you have to,_ and you hear about it first thing in the afternoon when the empress comes striding onto the ship, into your (reluctantly granted) tiny guest block, and pulls you out the door with your uniform halfway on.  You stammer questions in a really embarrassingly stupid way, but she doesn’t answer beyond the first curt words she says to you, which is a brief“…walk with me, guppy.”

She takes you straight to the interrogation blocks, and their tiny one-way windows, and you squint into the dark and see lines of terrified, affronted seadwellers and highblooded servants chained to the wall in rows, a clown in black and purple with their sleeves rolled up circling slowly around the current victim chained up to the wall.  It’s dim and hazy inside the room—for a second you don’t recognize what you’re seeing.

And then the interrogator picks up a knife, and turns, and you understand why you were brought here.

“… _talk at me about_ loyalty,” says Gamzee, and plays his fingertips over the edge of the knife, not looking at the seadweller in front of him.  His voice is mild—his face is gaunt and his eyes are sunken and hollow with exhaustion but bright with something hungry and awful.  “ _Talk to me, motherfucker._   Hold me off with words.  _Motherfucking appease._ ”

The seadweller babbles some shit about not knowing anything, about barely even seeing them at the party—Gamzee cocks his head to one side, and your palms ache, empty, even as you clench your hands shut on the absence of him. 

The knife makes a wet, soft sound when it sinks into the seadweller’s stomach—he chokes and goes still, eyes wide, making bubbling noises of shock through his gills, and Gamzee watches his face with wide eyes as the first high sounds of pain start to come out of him, breathing hard, face contorted under his paint.  If he knew you were there, would he ease up?  Would he go harder to spite you?  ( _No,_ some part of you whispers, stupid and weak and shaky, _no, he wouldn’t do that to me, no matter how badly I fucked up he wouldn’t_ …) 

But he doesn’t know you’re here, and he leans in almost to the prisoner’s ear and sighs.

“ _You know how hard it is on me_?” he asks, and his voice is a low, almost tender croon, half-lost under the keening pain-sounds of his victim.  “Doin’ this shit on you and not havin’ a hand to do it on me again when I’m done?”  He pulls the knife free, watches the blood glitter on the blade and then (your whole body twitches in protest) he lifts the blade and digs it slowly into his own flesh, dragging it from the pad of one finger to the delicate skin inside his wrist. A line of rich purple blood draws in the blade’s wake and trickles slowly down his palm, following the lines of his hand and painting his grey skin. His eyes fall halfway closed, rolling back in his head, his lips fall partly open like the pain is the most beautiful thing he’s ever felt, and your pusher thunders pity and terror in your chest.

“ _Fuck_ yes,” Gamzee says, more a sob than a word, and the sound of his voice goes up your back like lightning.  He sounds so fucking _desperate._   Like the pain is all he’s holding on to.  “Oh _, fuck yes_.”

You start to move before you can think about it—the empress grabs your arm.

“I have to—”

“Stay put, nubs.”

“—but—”

“Vantas.”

It’s not a logical decision; you snap to attention without a single thought, chin tipped back and hands locking behind your back.  The empress looks at you for a second, and then sighs and looks back at your moirail through the glass. 

“…he does take after his sandcestor,” she says thoughtfully.  “Kurlz was always like that, all wadin’ in neck deep in his freaky kinky shit because he knew it broke ‘em down.” 

Your whole body aches.  You feel kind of like you want to fall over and sleep forever.  You feel even more like you want to lie down and die.  For a second, every noise makes you want to tear out your sponge-clots, every light in the dim room makes your eyes feel like they’re getting compressed until they’re ready to pop.  Gamzee’s not doing anything else—he’s got his prisoner’s face cupped in one hand, not nearly pale but strangely gentle, watching the seadweller’s face as he tries to pull away, panicked and shaky with pain.  You don’t know what he’s waiting for, but there’s a watching kind of tension in his eyes, his face is slack and his eyes are weirdly, feverishly bright. 

He’s looking for something.  You’ll be damned if you know what it is.

The empress lays a hand on your shoulder and you’re so far sunk down into your own thoughts you jump and try to shake her off.  She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t growl either—you settle yourself into the nearest possible semblance of actual useful trollflesh instead of a mess of frustrated paleness and awful emotion, and she pulls her hand away.  

“…come on,” she says, and turns her back on the fenestrated observation pane.  You still can’t read her face.  “Li’l Clamzee can’t be the only one working on this.  Imperial crew gotta repiersent.”

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara and you are sinking.

It’s slow, but it’s getting faster.  Things are pulling at you, getting to you, you keep wanting the ones you got tattooed on your motherfucking soul there with you and then you remember Karkat tearing at you, _I’m trying harder than you to fix this!_ And Kurloz tied down and screaming for you in his dreams, and pieces tear off you.  You are righteously un-chill.  You are bits all ripped apart.  Things crawl in you and make their home there through the cracks left by them being gone, and you don’t sleep, got no room to eat, just sit and stare and _hate_ and think.  You go to your first interrogation that day hungry for hurting, for giving pain to the fuckers who might’ve hurt your matesprit, but you want your own pain even more and you cry as you hurt them like the fucked up wriggler who used to sit on the beach for shit as wasn’t coming.

You think of Karkat stopping you as you hurt, think of Kurloz loving to cause pain to you, and you feel cracks set in your claws, snap and spread in your thorax, wedge open seeping in your insides.  You’ve tried to sleep as you waited for the church to be set loose on the fuckers who won’t confess, you’ve tried to build strength up in yourself so you can do your matesprit proud, but…

…but the few times you’ve fallen into the sopor long enough to rest up your ganderbulbs you’ve had dreams that come to you and take you like a violent fuck unwanted, shake you by the throat and spit you out into your block again, breathing till you burn inside, till you’re fucked up to tears.  After those times, you don’t try to sleep again.  After those times, you don’t even dare standing still.

It’s the day they turn the search over to the church, after your first interrogations are done, that the empress comes to you. 

She comes as you step out with salty blood on your fronds, and you don’t wipe it off—just look at her, and know what it would feel like to sink down your claws at her gills.  She looks back, and you know she was watching and your cruelty don’t scare her.  What you have done to trolls, that does she do to motherfucking _planets._   You feel tired as ages.

“Clam w’me, Makara.”

You follow, bloody-fronded and shivery-clawed.  She don’t say a word to you the whole time, just take you to a door—sits your ass down outside it.

“You sit there,” she says, “—and you spray where you put, buoy.”  And you ain’t got force sufficient in you to fight how strong she says that.  You sit where you’re put and don’t fight.  She stands next to you, leaned up on the wall—when you look up at her, not sure what exactly the motherfuck she’s got planned, she just puts a finger up to her lips and points off into the room.

You listen.

“State your name, fucker,” are the first words you hear, and all at once you know the voice, you can imagine his face and your insides knot up angry and lonely and wanting and pissed off all at once.  This is Karkat.  This is Karkat doin’ his own interrogations while you were off in torture, but the one he’s tryin’ to force out answers from is one of your motherfucking goddamn _family_ and you shift around, uneasy and unchill.  Empress pulls her culling fork out faster than you can see—presses you back with the flat of it without even looking and then puts it away again when you’re settled.

“Schoolfeeder Halore Travye,” says Travye’s voice, and it’s all flat and no louder than it needs.  “Presenting for imperial interrogation.”

“Talk to me about _Kurloz_ ,” says Karkat, no leading-to and no softness to his voice, and you can hear the pit in him yawn at the name all hollowed-out inside him.  “You fucked each other, whatever.  I know what a freak he is.  Did you?”

Travye makes a noise more a groan than a sigh. 

“…I didn’t like pain,” he says all even, and you rest your head on your hands and listen with your eyes shut, imagine, think in pictures of them.  Kurloz would have been young then—smaller, more like you with your hair at your shoulders and paint still neat and set like a new convert.  Travye…smaller, horns shorter, skin softer, and you imagine some of the age off his face, some of the lines gone and the pain out of his eyes.  They’d look plenty damn fine together, for fuckin’ sure.  Plenty goddamn fine.  “But he…lit up.  It was motherfucking _beautiful_.”  His voice goes far away with you a second, and you remember the looking Kurloz turns on you when he’s hurting you, like you’re center of his everything, like stars turn around you.  Like you and your body and your body’s hurting are all as ever mattered to him.  “I…taught myself.”

 _You lied to him_ , you want to say at him, _you lied to him and do you find surprise in it now still that he left you after that,_ he does pain with intention—you turn a little, look past the entry-frame and see them, sitting.  Karkat’s square little back all hunched and tight, Travye all tall and angles, adult-broad and dark but eyes looking down. 

“He found out you were faking?”  Karkat’s voice ain’t cold, ain’t angry-hot, just there, nothing.  Feeder Travye don’t look up at him.  Stares down with lookstubs half-shut like a man gone up early to the carnival and leaving his corpse behind him still breathing.  His face is terrible far away.

“…he found out,” he repeats back.  “He noticed.  He was…so fuckin’ angry.” _(“I am not the tool of your destruction!_ ” Kurloz roars in your head, and the memory and imagining of his fear and his anger freeze-burn up your back like icy stars, _spark spark spark_ from your sitbones to your horns.)

“No wonder he didn’t want to stay with you,” says Karkat, and you twitch all over at the motherfucking _cruelty_ in his voice, how bitter and poison drip off his words like slitherbeast fangs.  Travye’s hands make square shape of fists in front of him.  “You forced him to do something he would hate himself for.” 

“ _Is it me you’re talking to_?”  Travye says back, and his voice is quiet and cool and edged like a motherfucking knife.  “Tell me, _threshecutioner_ , how did you force my name out of my brother Makara?  What kind of _interrogation_ you done on your own moirail—“

Karkat hits the table with the flat of a hand and it slams around the room like a gun, makes you jump and pull back away, hiding from the noise and the sight of his shoulders all tight and low. 

“ _We’re…_ ” starts Karkat, and you lean your head back and hope, hope for…god knows what, something, something to make any of this fucked up mess okay.  “…we’re not talking about me.  We’re talking about you.  Every single piece of evidence we’ve got points to you.  But I don’t think this is your kind of play, is it?  You’re too _pathetic._ ”  You hear the sitstub creak—he’s leaning forward, talking softer.  “…you’re a piece of this though,” he says. _“…who would want Gamzee dead?”_

“… _Gamzee_ might.”

You hear the fist hit flesh and it takes seconds to figure what it means—the words and the shock snap you down in on yourself, remembering the day after Kurloz got poisoned, remembering the circle from dreams to terror to dreams and back, and you would have let somebody tear open your throat if they’d wanted it then, and he knows it and you know it’s because he felt the same.  You wanted death to come get you because you were too scared to go get it yourself.  He knows.  He _knows._

You missed words as it sank into your pan—Karkat’s voice is echoing around, _moirail_ and _dead_ and _happy_ and _how fucking_ dare—!  But now there’s silence again.  You get up on your feet, half-thinking to run and not have to keep listening—you can hear Karkat breathing hard, but he’s silent, and nobody talks over him.  Stretches on and on and you can’t move in the quiet, everything is paralyzed.

“… _we have to go,_ ” says Karkat finally, and you jump at the sound of his voice.  He stands fast—hear his chair screech back and hit the wall, and beside you the empress turns her head, all frowned up and curious.  “We’re going.  Come here.  Follow me and don’t even fucking _think_ about running.”

“What the fuck—”

“I said _follow me._   We have to go find—I need Gamzee.  You need your moirail.  Where is she?”

A hand puts itself right in the middle of your back and shoves, hard.  You go stumbling out in the door and before you can even turn to snarl at the empress for pushing at you like that you’re facing Karkat, shoved in his path as he comes out the door at half a run. 

Karkat rears back at the sight of you, and you stare at each other for the split half of a second.  You can see the shadows under his eyes, feel the blood still under your own claws and you know he feels the same stab in his thorax you do, but the sight of him makes betrayal go down your horns like fire.  _The fuck are you doing here?_ Is all spelled out behind his eyes, but he doesn’t form breath around it, doesn’t make word, just stands and looks like he’s thinking of something.  Things happening behind his eyes.

And then you see him settle, and whatever he was thinking on unsure his mind makes itself up.  He’s got a hand around Travye’s cuff-chain, yanking him along with no regard of his status, and he grabs you by the arm too next second and takes off again, pulling you behind, not so much as _‘sorry’_ or ‘ _it’s been a couple days’_ or _any_ shit really as would help soothe over the growl that bubbles up when you see him.  Turns his head half back to Travye instead. 

“Where’s your moirail?  God I fucking hate this place, everything looks the same and all the sameness is full of pants-shittingly fucked-up murder-murals.  Well?!”

“Her—quarters—leave her out of this shit, I’m fine—”

“Oh what a fucking relief, you’re _fine._ ”  Karkat stops by the wall, lets go of you long enough to put frond flat on the screen and say “ _Imperial override,_ Karkat Vantas, locate Alenne Vetrum,” and then takes off again as soon as the computer beeps its answer at him, with his teeth all bared.  Doesn’t talk to either of you but to snap _shut up_ and _hurry the fuck UP!_ And you glance over at Travye and he glances back at you and the both of you look fucking awful.  His eyes ask—yours don’t have an answer.  Right this second for all you should be the ones at odds, you’re more brothers than before.  Brothers in loss and all that shit.  Brothers losing Kurloz.  Brothers set low by your moirail as he follows scent of treachery and poison. 

Then Travye’s palemate is there, between you and him, and you can’t see him anymore.  Karkat gives her just the time to tell her _follow me, right the fuck now, we’re having this out,_ before he’s off again.  Others following you now, brothers and sisters trailing you as Karkat leads the way off into the big open room the faithful get down in.  No party in there now—nothing here.  Karkat drops your wrist and Terezi and her paperfuckers come out the crowd to watch, the empress stands by the wall, the other faithful stream in and gather around the walls, more and more and you right in the middle with Travye and Karkat and sister Vetrum, all eyes on the four of you.

You’re scared as hell.

\--

You’re scared as hell.  Gamzee huddles next to you, staring around at your painted-up audience like he’s afraid they’ll fall on him and tear him open if he makes a single wrong move.  Travye is still bristling from the way you dragged him across the ship like an animal, and his palemate doesn’t look much calmer—she’s holding onto his arm.  You were hoping having the two of them both here would diffuse the situation a little bit, but apparently not.  Well fine.  It’s your neck on the line, anyway.  (You weren’t sure but what you felt when Gamzee was standing in front of you, what you _knew_ when you looked at his face, you know what’s happening here.  You’re sure.)

(God you hope you’re right.)

“Have you discovered something?”  Terezi’s voice is very even—she doesn’t know what’s happening.  Nobody does but you, and that is because they aren’t masters of romance and because they’re also idiots.  You’ve got this.  You nod at her sharply, and see just the hint of a flicker behind her glasses as her eyes widen.  Her voice stays perfectly even.  “…and?  Do we have a crime of lustful passion on our hands?  As previously concluded?”

“No,” you say, and you can feel it in the air, you can _feel_ it like a giant blood-pusher pounding, throbbing against your auricular sponge-clots.  You turn, and see Travye looking at you, and for a second he looks lost and you feel a pang of something awful in your chest. 

“No,” you say again, and you look past his shoulder, past his bulky shape to the lean figure half-hidden behind him.  “…this isn’t about fucking _lust._   This is about something…completely different.”  And you raise a hand, take a breath…and guess.

“…something different,” you say, and Vetrum stares at you as you point a claw straight at the center of her thorax.  “Something…paler.”

“What?”  Travye steps forward immediately, drawing himself up—you can see the empress by the wall watching you with narrowed eyes, Terezi standing perfectly still with her hands folded on her cane, ready to fight.  The clowns around the walls shift and mutter and growl.  You ignore them all.  “What the fuck you little piece of mutant shit how _dare_ you?!”

“Your moirail tried to poison mine,” you say, and the certainty of the statement that was so clear in your head sounds shakier and weaker in the open air but you’ve been bluffing all your life and this is no time to stop.  “I guess she didn’t bother to tell you.”

“Why would she do something like that?”  Travye spreads his arms, putting himself between you and his palemate, and for the first time you see a hint of the subjugglator he was before the poisoning—a glitter of white fangs and lean, bunched muscle.  “What reason would she ever have?!  She knows I wouldn’t—”

“Because,” you say, and your eyes are fixed on hers, your voice grows surer with every second.  “—because you hated Gamzee for being what you weren’t, but you let it go, didn’t you?  You were going to forget and let live and maybe you’d never get over the fact my moirail was on his back on the Grand Highblood’s pailing platform every day and it would fuck with you for _sweeps_ but you’d _deal_ with it, right?”  The words make Travye flinch, but you’re not watching him—your eyes are fixed on the face of the woman at his shoulder, at the way her claws dig at his arm and he doesn’t notice, doesn’t pay enough attention, doesn’t move to comfort her.  “…but if Gamzee was _dead,_ ” you say, and see Gamzee at the corner of your vision, see him slowly shaking his head, disbelieving, so fucking trusting.  “…well.  No fault of yours, right?  And you’d be there, nice and available, and you would be so much _happier_ , wouldn’t you?”

Travye jumps suddenly, wincing—his moirail is squeezing his arm so hard you can see a trickle of blood where one of her claws is breaking skin, not meeting your eyes anymore but staring up at him with this awful wide, worshipful stare, and you feel victorious and kind of like you’re going to eject your most recent nutrition ration both at the same time.  _Got you._

“You would,” she says, and her voice gets louder with each word, the cracks you saw behind her eyes are widening, “—you would—be happier, and it wouldn’t be your fault if he died, you wouldn’t cry anymore—!”

“Alenne,” Travye starts, but his moirail’s voice is rising, the red-orange that was never really gone is deepening in her eyes, and this is a wildfire that’s been burning for months finally springing up into a forest-killer, this is the final shifting of a mountain-side that’s been growing heavier for years.  This is what you trim at the root when you troll Gamzee every afternoon you can and talk to him about what you’re both stressing over, this long-burning fury that builds under the surface.  This is what you felt when you looked Gamzee in the eyes outside that interrogation room, _I would kill to make you happy, I would murder to make you well, I would kill I would_ KILL—

“That-- _upstart_ —stole him from you,” she says, and pulls back, breathing harder now, talking through a wide, awful smile that stretches her paint to grotesque proportions“—you said so, you said he was taking what you wanted, who you _love,_ Halore—”

“If you took out the obstacle, your palemate could be happy, right?” You press, and she doesn’t even look at you but she nods, shaking, claws crooked—you hear the soft, awful sound of Gamzee’s shuddering breaths as though from far away.  This will hurt him, this is going to hurt him to the core.  But you can’t stop.

“… _he’s Gamzee’s now,_ ” you say, and her head turns slowly toward you like a wild animal smelling new prey.  “You failed.  You poisoned the wrong troll.”  For a second your eyes meet and lock, and you can see yourself still reflected there, the burning, painful pity in her wide, furious eyes, the protectiveness in the way her breath hisses through her teeth.

And then, in the quiet, you hear a shaky, tiny voice that seems to douse your respiration sponges in pure ice.

“… _sister_?”

You see the moment she snaps, but when you throw yourself forward your weight is barely enough to slow her down as she charges madly at Gamzee, head down, baring more teeth than you have ever seen in your fucking life, eyes pure red.  You snatch at her arm and drag her halfway around—she notices you enough to lash out and then grunts as another purpleblood hits her hard and pins her arm.  She thrashes, howling, and another two spring forward and grab her second arm and around her throat, pulling her back, cutting off her air.

“ _You don’t deserve him_!!” she shrieks, and thrashes at the hands holding her back—Gamzee is staring at her with this awful, awful look in his eyes, like her words are going to kill him as sure as their poison almost killed his ancestor.  He looks tiny, standing alone as she tries to lash out at him—he flinches with every curse and thrash.  “ _My palemate deserves him, not some greedy little pain-slut fresh off-planet, not some little bitch who’d roll over for anybody with a knife you_ blasphemer _you_ traitor _you’d pile a mutant and then go straight to his block to get fucked when it’s_ my moirail _who deserves –_ ”

“ _Alenne_ ,” says Travye, really really quiet, and there’s pure, blank horror behind his tired eyes.  “Alenne.  Sister, what have you done?”

“Do you confess to the attempted poisoning of Gamzee Makara?” you growl, and she spits more vitriol, _I’d do it again I’d do it right you don’t deserve the man my palemate loves_ and the crowd around you is making an awful amount of pan-shattering noise, howling and honking and wailing. “You’re under arrest by the direct order of her Imperious Condescension— _uhff—_ ”  A bony cartilage spur hits you in the guts—you stagger back and then lower your head and go charging forward again with the sheer force of your rage and frustration and the ache in your bones and _slam_ into her just under her thoracic cage, putting all your weight behind your horns.

It is the most satisfying noise in the world when she hits the ground, and the most satisfying _silence_ in the world when the hall goes dead quiet around you.  You put a knee on her thorax, breathing hard, and growl it good and loud as she gasps, winded out of her killing rage for a second.

“… _you are under arrest, honktard,_ ” you say, and draw a sickle.  “For nearly fucking _killing_ the Grand Highblood.  And being a shitty-ass palemate.”

The other clowns come down on her as she starts to struggle—her awful screams are hoarser now, but she’s still cursing, yelling, and Gamzee is still shivering and flinching like every word hurts him.  You stand up, resist the urge to go to him, resist the urge to cover his ears for him and run your fingers through his hair.  Turn to Travye instead—he looks almost as terrible, ears and fins pinned flat.  His eyes are suspiciously bright and you don’t want to think about why. 

You open your mouth, with the words _control your goddamn motherfucking moirail you piece of shit_ forming in your mouth—but Gamzee gets there first.

“ _Brother,_ ” he says, and steps forward, a few timid steps at a time.  “Go.  Go.  Fucking _go_ to her.”

Travye’s face twitches.  For a second, the blank mask fades away, and the thought rises baguely in the back of your pan that you would be really fucking freaked out if you had to face this asshole in a fight.  You’ve only ever seen him calm, numb after his old _crush_ got poisoned.  But there’s pure fury behind his eyes. 

“ _You tell me to do._ Fucking.  WHAT?”

“You…” Gamzee’s eyes flicker from his teacher to the screaming woman on the ground, his voice is distant.  “…you let her help and help—but brother, you ever ask what hurt at her?”

Travye blinks and then frowns at him.  “Makara,” he says, voice ragged, “…don’t go preachin’ on my quadrants at me—you, so less an age than—”

“You went clawing at Kurloz’s quadrants, I can turn a hand to yours!”

It’s almost a snap.  Gamzee seems to catch it; he takes a deep breath, and then another, and his voice doesn’t stop trembling but at least the orange of his eyes fades a little more to gold.  “If you’d made to _listen_ to her you’d’ve known what she was puttin’ her claws to, that she thought so low of me, that she wanted me dead for you, wouldn’t you?  Motherfucker, _look at your palemate._ Get a good look on of what she thought she’d do to make your life better.  And now you go turning from her?!”

“She _almost killed the man I—”_ Travye chokes himself off, grinding his teeth, and his broad shoulders roll around a deep snarl.  “She almost killed him!”

“What the _fuck_ do you think a moirail’s supposed to do?!”  Gamzee’s voice is rising now, and there’s an edge of something like desperation to it.  The other clowns are starting to back away, eyes fixed on the two figures in the middle of the room as they square up to each other—Gamzee is just as tall as him, you notice through the numb fog of horror.  Gamzee’s the same height, dark-skinned and long-horned and his fangs gleam as he snarls and you’re fucking terrified.  “What’s a moirail meant for if not for this?!”

“You think this is in _any fucking way what a palemate’s meant for?_ ” Travye hisses, “—you expect that little freak-blood of your to kill for you and call that pale, do you?” 

Gamzee doesn’t look back at you, but he flinches from the words like he’s been slapped.  “ _No,_ ” he says.  “…I _expect_ —I expect, he’ll be there to tell me _no_ when I want to take a motherfucker and _string them up from their guts._   I expect when I’m set to breathe death and drink blood he’ll come and pull me back again, I expect he’ll pull my thoughts out from me and find the murder in them and set them back again right, I _expect_ he’ll _stop me killing_ , I expect of him every—fucking— _thing—_ you failed to motherfucking _DO!_ ”

Travye wavers.  Steps back, just the slightest stagger of a movement, but Gamzee doesn’t follow, just stares at him and pants through open fangs, shivering with the effort of holding himself back. 

“…it’s not just her job,” he says.  “There has to be a…a motherfuckin’ balance here.  Has to be her taking care of you and you taking care of her.”  And you hear your own voice in the way he says it, your clipped words, your tired, painful affection. Travye stares at him, and you think for a second you see real, true respect in his eyes.

“Brother,” says Gamzee, and puts a hand on his teacher’s shoulder.  “…you ain’t taken care of your moirail.  Don’t you figure she needs it now?”

There’s a long, silent moment.  Travye’s eyes are fixed on his moirail—he doesn’t seem to notice when the empress turns to the crowd of clowns and pulls her double-ended culling fork silently out of her sylladex.  The crowd shifts and mutters uneasily, but she bares all of her teeth and hisses and they back away, slowly easing out of the massive block.  Some of them are staring in unabashed interest—most of the others have averted their eyes from the awful intimacy of the moment.  Within minutes you have the place to yourself.  And you…

You can’t help it, okay, romance is your fucking _passion_.  Drama and romance are what you live off of and your eyes keep getting sucked back to the woman lying on the ground and the tall, bony figure walking slowly toward her.

Vetrum isn’t fighting or struggling anymore.  She’s lying on the ground where she was left, taking deep breaths, staring up at the ceiling—god only knows what’s going through her thinkpan.  Her moirail (if you can fucking call him that, goddammit, why does nobody else seem to understand moirallegiance?)  kneels down next to her, and she sits up when he puts a steadying hand on her shoulder.  His voice is very, very quiet, just barely audible, but  you’re close enough to hear him and the shaking in his voice is painful to hear.  ( _familiar to hear_ ) 

“ _I didn’t want this,_ ” he says.  “ _I didn’t want this, sister I never wanted you to hurt our family.  I’d rather I be the one that hurt.  Thought you fuckin’ knew that, Alenne._ ”

“I wanted to help you,” she says, and her voice is still a raspy hiss but her claws are slowly untensing and she looks…almost confused.  “ _I was going to help you,_ Halore, it’s my job to—”

“ _My job to keep you steady,_ ” he finishes for her.  “ _My job to help you and be good to you like you been good to me, like you helped me out._ ”  He’s easing her closer—she’s shaking her head like she’s trying to shake something away from her, staring blank at the ground.  His voice is low and hypnotically smooth—you don’t let your head turn, but your eyes flicker to Gamzee and your thinkpan slides the treacherous thought _is his voice going to get that much lower?_ And the image of his sweet, dopey face along with that low, soothing voice, a cold hand stroking your hair…

…that’s assuming he ever forgives you enough to touch you again.  God, _god,_ get it together Vantas.  God.  You’re all over the place these nights. 

“ _…alone in that squeakbeast pit on that burning planet and you kept me there thinking, didn’t you, but I didn’t ever ask you how many you killed to get to me_ —” 

 “ _You hate him,_ ” she gasps, half-sobbing, and he pulls her closer, shaking his head helplessly, eyes far away.  “ _I wanted—if I—_ ”

“…clam on,” says her Condescension, and her culling fork vanishes again, back into her shella— _sylla_ dex.  Her face is…completely unreadable.  You didn’t look at her when the stupid panleak confessed to the almost-murder…you wonder what she looked like.  What she thought.  Whether her knuckles went silver on her weapon like they did on the arms of her throne when her oldest…servant…was brought down.  Now, her face is still as stone.  “There’s nofin  else to do here.”

You hesitate, but you don’t really have a choice.  You fall in behind her, pacing steadily toward the door. 

And come up against a tall figure in black, still standing like a sentinel.

Gamzee looks at you for a split second, and you can see the hurt and the anger in his eyes like they’re fresh, underneath a current of deep, abiding pain, and even stronger than any of those there’s a longing, a needing and when he reaches out for a second you think he’s going to cup your cheek in his hand and you’re aching to apologize.

He pats you once, awkwardly, on the shoulder.  Then he pushes out past you, and he’s gone.

\--

They’re hurting Kurloz again.

You can’t see quite how they got him tied up, your eyes keep blurring and shit keeps flickering on and off like your pan ain’t quite hooked together right but Kurloz is there in the dark room, bowed over and tied somehow and his back is bloody and tore all to shreds.  Used to be he’d scream when they brought the whip down but the light inside his thorax all leaks out through the holes they’ve whipped in his flesh and there’s not enough of him left to scream now and he can’t _he can’t_ _die_ —His maw’s all full of blood just like dad’s, dripping on down his lips and chin and soft throat, cold motherfucking steel sticking out his side and you can’t stop seeing him even when you close your eyes.

“ _Stop it,_ ” you try to say, and it don’t even come out, but they never listened to you in the dark room and they laugh at you for thinking it and say it back at you all mocking, _stop it, he says stop it, look at him cry_ —there’s a leg thrown over yours, but it bends broken where it shouldn’t and the sister it should be attached to is clutching at the place they cut it off and screaming _screaming_ and they’re hurting Kurloz they’re _hurting your family—_

You wake up with a noise not quite a scream, a noise not quite a sob that twists around the word _please_ and _no stop hurting him—_

You’re in your ‘coon.  You’re in your recuperacoon and the air is chill and cool, not foul-hot and bloody, the air you gasp is sweet with elixir-sugar and there’s a little glow of the bottle-lights you hung up from your block ceiling, lighting up through the chitin.  Went to ‘coon early, you remember that, you remember, got a good recall on of that, after all your sister’s screams at you got to echoing around your pan, _pain-slut_ and _not worth him_.  Went to ‘coon early and you went and had another evil dream, but that’s all.  You’re gonna be calm.  You’re safe, you’re fucking safe, you’re okay, you’re—

You’re not okay.  You pull yourself up out and into the air and go stumbling through the dark, shove through into your ablutions block with the feeling of hot hands on your naked flesh, pushing you, pulling you, digging in claws and then laughing at you for liking it, _screaming_ , SCREAMING—

you turn the water on cold as ice and try to wash away their hands but your pan is spinning and you keep _being_ there, the dark room, the foul air, the _screaming_ , keep feeling it try to close up around you like hands groping for your flesh unwanted.  You make your fronds take you out into your block—pull on clothes, but the trembling takes you so hard you barely get on a pair of pants before your fingers stop working.  You try three times to pick up a shirt and drop it again and again and give up. You need out, out of here, out of the dark and away from them where they are in your pan, where they’re taking you again _they’re taking you again_ —

You shove out into the hall outside, staggering slow—walk and walk faster and then run, run hard and fast, not thinking on where you’re going, just letting fronds pound metal, letting your pan go and _running_.  The dreams chase on behind you, hot hands forcing you to turn, voice in your ear _if you don’t open your eyes we’ll cut you so you can never close them again you cowardly piece of filth what, are you jealous of them you_ freak _you freak you fucking deviant_ and you close your eyes and run—

“Brother!”

\--and stop.  There’s footsteps behind you, catching you up, and breaths hard and fast.  You’re breathing hard too, but you got long, long legs now and you cover more ground walking fast than some do running full out.  The shaking is eased for now.  The fearing sounds in your thorax are beaten down, if only for now.  You turn back and look.

Uderak comes up jogging out of the dark, just an undershirt and messed up bloody-spattered pants.  His face and hands are all fresh-scrubbed and new-painted—he’s been inquisiting, and your face is humiliating-bare.  You turn and cover it from him.

“Bro?”  he comes close at you—your knees shake like to buckle, choke closes up on words wanting out.  Fuck, _fuck_ you’re a couple breaths from falling flat on your ass.  “Holy shit, you okay?”

Words won’t come.  You fight out a noise but it’s just that, just a broken noise.  Whine like a dying grub.  You clamp your trap shut again, but the noise is out, damage is done, and he makes a little sound in return, chirring noise you never heard from him before, and your face burns.

“Brother,” he says again, and you can feel him come closer, feel it in your horns and every trembling inch of you.  His voice grows softer, worried at you. “What’s up?”

“ _Died—_ “ the word is a choke, awful and tiny and still so loud.  “—died _they died right there—in front of—fuck_ fuck fuckfuckfuck—how’s that fair why didn’t they just hurt me why didn’t they just fucking _kill me_ why didn’t they kill me instead—”

He makes a noise you barely hear and a hand touches your shoulder.  The touch is all cool and it’s real and it’s _there_ —it helps, a little.  Gives you something to think on that’s not the pain-noises, the sound of holy corpses hitting the bloody floor like trash, _god—_   “Don’t say shit like that,” he says, and squeezes your shoulder.  “Brother—shit.  Gamzee.”  His voice is gentler far than the ones in your pan, and you can stop for a second, listen at it and breathe.  “Gamzee, that’s then.  Not now, not here.”

“I _know._ ”  But the hands drag at you, your snuff-nodes fill up with the stink and your eyes keep flashing things you know ain’t there, faces, blood, grinning teeth, hands on your knees—“ _FUCK,_ fuck _I know, I know—_ they’re still _there,_ they got up in under my horns and got their fangs down in my thinkpan, fuck—”

Some little part of you, some part that speaks with Karkat’s voice, whispers _no._   Whispers _you’re working yourself up, you precious_ stupid _idiot, look at me, look at me,_ _calm down,_ but he’s not there any more than the others are there, and Uderak isn’t Karkat and he doesn’t grab you, try to calm you or pull you together.  He just keeps a frond on your shoulder and squeezes you and it’s not enough, not nearly enough.  Karkat would know.  Karkat you want _Karkat._

It’s a single smell, stops your spiraling for a second, just one thing all thin and sharp through the fog—sugar and bitter and rich.  Smells like a fuzzy, dizzy thinkpan and buzzing horns.  Brother’s been drinkin’.  You cling to that smell and lean into him, fill your sensing with it instead of the stench of blood and shit and sweat.  Cold, not choking-hot.  Drinking-bitter-sweet, not dying-foul.  Your cheek bumps his shoulder.  His arm comes around, presses at your back.

“Gamzee,” he says again, and it comes to you how rare it is, him calling at you so.  On the everynight you recall him saying _brother_ , _brother,_ never your name.  The memories go swimming around you, Kurloz tied down so vivid-sharp like it was motherfucking _real_ , begging at them _don’t hurt Gamzee, don’t hurt Gamzee,_ and you squeeze your oculars good and tight-shut and make that noise again, tiny grub-sound. 

“ _Brother,”_ you say, but that ain’t enough—not _nearly_ sufficient for this, _brother_ is too little when it was brothers and sisters down there with you.  He wasn’t there.  His name wasn’t among theirs.  “— _Uderak—_ “

“Verato,” he says, and squeezes at your shoulder.  “Never did get a proper introduction at you, b—Gamzee.”  He’s rocking a little where he sits—you go with him as he moves and it’s another thing that’s different, that reminds of different memories.  It’s like putting adhesion strips over a busted shuttle hull, but you cling at the scraps as they come—rocking like waves, beach, hive, sand, stars, slime on your fingers, _memory_ that’s not the dark room, the dark room and its stink and heat, the dark room where your family screamed and you were left untouched for your motherfucking _perversion_ , the _dark fucking ROOM—_

The noise comes out of you then is terrible, long and harsh like the tearing of metal, grating on pan and clots and it makes your own self shudder to hear it bounce back at you like there’s a hundred of you here in torment, paying back for your lack of suffering as your family suffered.  Verato is saying shit in your ear, _brother, look at me, fucking hell, holy messiahs, what the fuck--_ but your thought lands on one thing and one thing alone and you don’t listen to him any more than that.

“— _help me,_ ” you get out through the noise in your pan, and he holds on your shoulder and nods.  “H-help me get—I need—”

“What?”  He’s looking hard on you, nothing but you and it makes some part of you whisper at you, there’s something you should be noticing but the fear drowns that shit right out.  “Anything, anything you need.”

“—need—” you fumble in your sylladex for your husktop, pull a club by accident and then drop it, your hands are shaking so bad.  “—fuck!  Shit, no, no no I need—“

“Shh,” he says, and it’s that that brings the word to you, your pan finally snaps the words together and you _know,_ know what you need.  You reach again and this time you get your palmhusk, but your claws go clattering over it and you can’t make them still enough, can’t reach him, can’t call and hear his voice— “Shh, just tell me—

“ _Karkat._ ”

His hand on you goes still, but you’re not noticing right this motherfucking second—they’re still behind you, still whispering _tell me about your master’s flagship, tell us how to get onto your ship,_ tell us his _weaknesses—_ there in your ear like they whispered as they fucked you, god, and you were grateful for it because at least that you could hate, at least that didn’t _hurt—_

“No!” You didn’t mean the word to come out but it howls out into the silence, stupid shit to fuckers who ain’t even there, “—no _fuck_ no they don’t know don’t touch them—I need Karkat—”

“ _Why_?”

You almost laugh, it’s such a joke to ask—in what way do you _not_ need him?  In what fucking way are you not utterly _fucking_ broken right now, what single part of you is there that doesn’t need his warm eyes and rough voice and hot hands?  There’s reasons you shouldn’t but they won’t come now, you _need_ him now and you got nobody else who can simmer down what’s tearing you up inside.

But he asks again, “Why do you need him?” and you look up and see him look on you, serious as dark itself.  His hand is still squeezing at your shoulder.  “Why’d you want more warm hands right now, can he even help you with shit like this?  You don’t add more hot to a burn, brother, you—” he stops, but his hand moves, up and down your shoulder, and those scars he’s touching are what Karkat touched, so hurting with pale for you as you bled on his hands.  “…you cool it down.”

And his hands are so cool and they wipe away the warmblood claws tearing into you but—

“ _Don’t you compare my moirail to the shit that fucking hurt us,_ ” you hiss out, and his hand flinches away from your arm.  “ _Don’t you dare, don’t you_ compare, don’t you fucking start on him like he’s the same as them!”

“But he hurt you too!” His voice has gone louder, that wash of drinking sweetness hitting your skin and a sound to his voice like you never heard before.   “He never came down in that place forsaken by all messiahs to find you, and he ain’t here now because he fucked up and didn’t take care of what you care for in your soul, Gamzee, he didn’t—but I fucking _was_ , I _could!_ ”

Jolts you right open.  The old pain and hate eases off with the shock of it, and you stare at him like he hit you, like he knocked you right out.  “…I,” you get out, and it comes out so small and weak and normal-like you can’t motherfucking believe it’s your own voice.  “…y-you…you making moves at my pale quadrant?”

It’s half a joke, but he jumps like you slapped him.  Hand pulls off of your shoulder, and then it comes back and closes tight on it, like he’s making a challenge at you to pull away.  But that’s all, right, that’s all.  You wait for him to say no, you wait for him to deny it.

He thins his lips and looks away from you and doesn’t answer.

“Oh fuck,” you say, and it’s not surprise even as much as it is a pain in your pusher.  “Oh, little brother, Karkat was right.”

This time you see the look cross his eyes at the noise of Karkat’s name, and your pusher just hurts at you, every beat.  “Well,” he says.  “Would hate to fuck up on _Karkat’s_ precious guesswork.  Hate to fuck up Karkat’s _plan._ ”

“Don’t—”

He waves you off.  “No, I get it,” he says, and his voice is snake venom, voice like needles of ice.  And under it all, fuck if you can’t hear him hurting.  Every word hurting. “Match made in the fucking hands of the messiahs themselves or some—some blasphemous _shit,_ fuck, like he’ll ever—”

“You got a moirail already,” you say, because it’s that or hear him speak on, hear what he’s saying so poisonous and full of rage.  You’re gonna throw up.  Your hands are still shaking so bad.  “I know you do, brother, you told me.”

“Just because your quadrants are _perfect_ and _serendipity-given_ doesn’t mean everybody else’s are,” he says, _hurting, hurting_ you can hear it and it hurts you too but you can’t just—you can’t—  “We broke up.  It fucking _happens_.” He snorts, half a laugh unfunny and strange.  “…well, not to _you._ ”

“Just—if a motherfucker would just—”  you want Karkat, Karkat Karkat, he’d know what to do and maybe then your brother who you love wouldn’t be looking at you like that, when you got no answer for him but the one you’re giving.  He’s important to you and that’s true, but he’s not— _Karkat._ He can’t ever be Karkat.  “I can’t be your motherfucking palemate!”

“I calmed you down pretty motherfucking well just now!”

The reminder’s a slap.  But it’s also an untruth, a _heinous fucking untruth_ , because you’re quieted but not whole, your pusher is still beating drums in your thinkpan.  You bare your teeth up at him, and there’s that heat you know means your eyes are orange-red all across and throughout. 

“ _Take a second look, motherfucker,_ ” you say, ragged and hissing.  “Take a look and tell me you can _take what I fucking dish out._ ”

He pulls his fronds away from you like you’re the one burning.  You see him, and you want him to stop hurting but you wouldn’t ever touch him the way you want Karkat to touch you and you don’t trust yourself to be near right this second when he’d dare speak so evil on what you love.

“… _go._ ”

He stares at you.  You bare fangs at him.

“Get _gone!_ ”

And he isn’t Karkat, because he backs away from you with hurt in his eyes, and fear, and he doesn’t want to go but go he does.

You get up to your feet because it’s that or sit there alone in the dark, and the dark is where things come from and tear at you.  Takes you a long time to recognize the mural you’re under—a martyr the lowbloods boiled in saltwater.  Fucking hilarious.  There’s a metal bar through your thorax and you can’t _fucking breathe_ and you’re across the ship from your block oh god you have to walk back on your own and it’s your own stupid fucking fault _._  

You get the palmhusk up and push at it, dial the wrong code twice and then finally get the right number and hold it up to listen.  It makes that little dialing noise so long it feels like nights, and you have to stop and turn your face into cool metal, breathe hard and hard and hard and feel your thinkpan spin around.  And then, on the very last one, it goes _clickclick_ and it’s silent.

“Karkat?”

You hear him on the other end—hear his breath stop in his thorax and then start again.

“ _Karkat,_ ” you say, and your voice comes out like a sob.  You hear him breathe on the other end, not answering, quiet.  “ _They’re—_ h— _hhh—_ FUCK— _again they’re hurting me again_ brother please won’t ever ask for you unwanted again—”

“Gamzee.” 

His voice cuts through the fog of bad memory like a knife through flesh—heat hits like fire, not heat of sweat and blood but heat of hot, dry hands.  Heat of Karkat’s eyes and skin.  You want his touch so bad right now it could make you cry, and you stagger off to one side and lean yourself up against the wall to breathe, big hungry breaths that can’t quite ever fill your thorax.

“Gamzee,” he says again.  “Listen to me.  I wasn’t there, was I?”

Your wrists ache from the chains.  You shake your head.

“Gamzee, yes or no?”

Right, right right he’s not fucking _here_ , he can’t see you, you fucked up and he’s motherfucking gone, away from you and far off. 

“…no,” you force up, burning all up your throatstem.  “ _No,_ no you weren’t ever there—”

“I’m here.”

“I know where I am I _know_ okay, I can’t stop _seeing_ —”

“Don’t wind yourself up.” 

Shuts your thinkpan down all red and soft.  You want to hold onto him and purr, and cry, and he’s not here. 

“Now,” says Karkat, and he still sounds sleepy, you could almost be lying next to him, and you have to sniff real hard and your ganderbulbs still burn and ache, you’re a vessel broken and the overflow is motherfucking coming through the cracks.  “Tell me what happened.  Simple concepts.  You had one of those awful ugly-ass dreams again, didn’t you?”  Was it—” a yawn bends his words like hot metal, come out again the other side.  “—was—it just what happened again, or was it one of the worse ones?”

“ _Worse,_ I—”

“Simple words.”

Thinking in words all lined up neat is hard, hard hard hard.  You gotta stop and breathe and think hard about it before you can come out with the right things, and it gets you another minute’s walk.  “…Kurloz,” you say, because that’s a simple word, right?  God, you’re hurting all over and you’re tired, so tired, there’s stars in your eyes.  “Kurloz, he, he was there.  Had him—” the words break, crack and fall apart.  “— _chained up, they were_ \---they were gonna kill him, they were whipping him so hard brother they were tearing the skin from off his—”

“Shhhh  He’s healing just fine.”  He groans like he’s pulling himself up—can hear the sleepy sopor warm in his voice.  “He’ll be okay.  You know he’s going to be fine, this is just your thinkpan fucking with you because you’re scared.”

It feels so fucking good, hurts so good to hear him say that.  You nod, forget he can’t see you, but he doesn’t need you to answer. 

“Where are you?  You still in your block?”

“No, I—I went—” Words.  “Went running, went out to—to get away from all that shit, I had to get somewhere it wouldn’t…”

“Okay.”  He says.  “Okay.  That’s okay, just get back to your block.  Turn your sopor down to cold and get back in your slime.”

He talks to you all the way back to your block, and it’s almost the same as it ever was, because you fucking _need_ him and so you go crawling back.  When you’re back to your block the words choke off, the ease leaves both of you hanging and half-soothed and awkward. 

“…get some sleep,” he tells you, but it’s quiet and he’s not sure, and you feel like an asshole and wronged by him both together.

“Yeah,” is all you say.  “…okay.”

You close the phone and slide into chill slime, and the last thing you see as you drift back off into cool fog is the lights hanging around your block outside your ‘coon, the bright colors lighting up familiar shapes in the dark.  Safe. 

You wander through dreams of cold sand, following along the water line behind a great tall figure that’s always too far off from you to reach, but you don’t go back to the dark room and this time you don’t wake up again.


	19. How Fucking Dare You

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and for a master of romance you’re awfully confused about your own quadrants. 

Gamzee isn’t talking to you, and you’re sure as hell not going to talk to him, you’re a piece of shit and you don’t get to call him your moirail right now.  You may have been trying to do something good, but you hurt him and you’re not supposed to hurt your moirail to get what you want, right?  God, fuck past you right up the—

Gamzee isn’t talking to you, except for that one heartbreaking ping a few days ago when you had to talk him through another one of his awful flashback-dreams.  Meenah is still busy chasing the ends of the poisoning case, because Travye’s moirail has confessed and apparently is being a lot more helpful now but her colluders never made direct contact with her and it’s doing them a lot of favors in the not-getting-found department.  Not that the empress is—is involved in your quadrants.  Except…she acts _so flushed_ sometimes, and it hurts, thinking all she wants out of it is sex.  If it was just pailing she wouldn’t tell you jokes, would she?  She wouldn’t…pull you up in her chair with you and cuddle you in a really embarrassing way, or make a picture of you the screenslayer on her ship-feed screens in her quarters.  If it was just sex, would she tell you her hatchname?

And then there’s _this_ asshole.

You are, to your chagrin, walking the heavily-“painted” corridors of the clown church flagship, and starting to realize (to your even more intense chagrin) that you actually know where you’re going.  Which just goes to show that you have been spending way _way_ too much time on this goddamn floating horn-heap and you need to get back to (relatively) sane company (or Gamzee’s room, Gamzee’s room always makes you feel so much more s—)

You stop on the thought and glare at the entrance portal you’ve come to a stop in front of.  Speaking of quadrants that aren’t quadrants…Fuck.  Time to compose yourself.  You were already onboard when that fucking awful clown with the shriveled heads and the speech impediment apparently sent the empress a message verifying that they saw the Grand Highblood safely back to his private blocks and that he’s conscious and taking sense again.  You know this because you got a message demanding that you get up immediately (it’s almost three in the afternoon, holy shit) and go _S-----EA W)(ASSUP_

So here you are.  You raise a hand to knock, snarl at yourself, punch in the imperial override code and walk straight in.

Kurloz straightens up abruptly when you come in, glaring at the door like he’s about ready to kill the first thing that comes through it.  He was leaning heavily against the wall before you disturbed him; he looks drawn and disheveled and exhausted beyond belief, but he _is_ upright and his eyes are focused on what’s in front of him, not on some kind of distant nightmare-fantasy. 

His face is unpainted. 

The bareness of it is almost startling, like you walked into the wrong room—when he looks up and sees you there his head starts to turn, like he’s going to hide it from you.  Then, slowly, he relaxes and turns to look at you again with a long, hissing sigh.

“ _Vantas,_ ” he says harshly.  His voice sounds awful, sandy and unused.  He doesn’t have to ask; the question is there in the way he looks at you.

“Her Condescension has put me in charge of checking on you,” you say, as glibly as you can manage. Goddammit, the paint doesn’t even mean anything to you but you’ve spent so long around Gamzee and the sight of his bare face makes you want to avert your eyes like a faygo-swilling church-chump.  It’s not as awkward as if you’d walked in on him pailing himself or something, but it makes your guts squirm and tighten.  “Looks like you finally managed to haul your huge ugly ass into an upright position at least.  What a _motherfucking_ _miracle._ ”

He makes a long, grumbling noise—rolls his eyes.  “Sendin’ in this little heretical bitch-shit in here to make sure I ain’t kicked the pail yet,” he growls.  “Insult, is what that shit is.  Imperial _bucket-whore_ ain’t in a place to enter my block.”

“Well,” you say, faster than you mean to, and it comes out more of a snap than a word, and more of a snarl than anything else.  “—looks like you’re back to normal, by which I mean talking out your ass and being a piece of shit for a fucking laugh.  What kind of unsophisticated bullshit sense of humor thinks being a rancid perigee-old chuteplug to people and then laughing is actually a _funny_ _joke_?”

And for just a second his eyes go wide and his fins snap flared like a threat, and you feel it hit your pan like a shot of adrenaline straight to the aggravation lobe.  God, fuck, shit.  You are _not_ going to—you don’t—you absolutely do not.  You’re not even going to think about how much you do not, that’s how little you do.  Fuck.

“You want to go a _little bit light_ on the _comment and fucking NAG of my_ goddamn HUMOR,” he says, and if there is one thing you’ve picked up from Gamzee it’s that when one of these painted assholes starts to have serious trouble moderating between clot-clanging snarl and growly whisper-hiss, you have either fucked up for the last time ever or you are about three seconds from getting your clothes shredded like a cheap porno actormentor.  Your feet want to back toward the door.  “You want—“

“I want to get back to the empress and let her know you have proven yourself— _once a-fucking-_ gain—too boiled in your own bile and waste-juices to die.”  You make your best attempt at an insouciant shrug.  “And _you_ want…what, to lie back down?  You look like the walking dead.”

He gives you the pissiest, gloweriest look you have ever seen.  He might as well be putting out a thick black fog for all the impatient, exhausted displeasure he’s broadcasting at you.

“ _I want you,_ ” he says, and stops for a second to take a deep breath.  Your spine does something tingly and weird, half _danger danger get out_ and half _pull his hair and growl bite his neck and—_.  “ _To_ get the FUCK out of my block.  Before I fuckin’ _crunch_ you like the little mutant scuttlebug you motherfuckin’ well _are._ ”

…okay, so maybe when Gamzee told you he “gets grumpy and shit on the rarer occasion at early nights” he meant he would tear the head off of people who showed up and antagonized him when he just woke up.  You’re the same way, you get that.  He’s still a giant waste-of-space pissant though.

“Sure,” you say, like the bigger troll in this equation, and pretend your insides don’t turn to ice with your own daring as you turn your back on his snarl like it doesn’t even concern you.  God this is stupidly insulting (god you wish you could see his face).  “Call your goddamn matesprit.  He should know you’re awake.”

\--

Vantas goes, and to yell after him would be a weakness so you glower and snarl silent instead and let him go.  Little fucker must not be allowed to think himself winning this fight.  Not that there is a fight there to have.  You don’t _fight_ some fucker that far down low under you.  You don’t let him think he’s eye-to-eye with you, face to face—even if Vantas would have to get up in your lap to be up on line with your—

You have long and since got past the thought _I didn’t just think that shit,_ because you know what you think and do not think and there ain’t no point un-sharping your thinkpan grinding it off itself.  Gotta keep it all flowing one way.  But that one you have to stop and choke on a second. 

On the one hand, he is a feisty little fucker, up above his station in life which is to be a smear at the foot of your throne so you can grind him under your feet every night.  He is loud when he should speak soft, he is _red-eyed and blasphemous_ and he mocks your sense of goddamn humor on a way too MOTHERFUCKING REGULAR basis. 

On the other hand…all those things again, and the added-on knowing that even if he’d stayed just then, what you had in mind to do to him wasn’t on the lines of bleeding-jars and paintbrushes.  There’s parts of you still, parts that want to kill him and be done with it.  But overall…

You give up on what you think of him and move on to the next thing, which is…messiahs damn him, but he’s right.  You’re up now, and Meenah knows or Vantas wouldn’t have known.  And if Meenah knows, there’s only one person else you need to tell right this second. 

You crack a skull to pull out your palmhusk—your modus has gone all to hell while you were out, holy shit, where you shuffling stuff around while you dreamed?  And send Gamzee just a couple words.  _hey little motherfucker MY LUSUS IS GONE OUT FOR A SPELL come over ;o)_ like a dumbass wriggler on the homeworld when you were young.

You do your best to get all cleaned back up again while you wait for him to get there—you’re moving slow, too tired already, and you pick out most important and start there.  You don’t have time or steady hands for paint just now—you leave your face bare, but clean it and dry it and feel considerable more trollish than you did before.  You strip off your sweaty shirt and scrub off the worse of the smell of sweat that clings to you.  You need a real honest-to-god ablution some point soon, but not now.  No time, not if you know Gamzee.  Fuck, you leaving him like that, he must have just about killed himself worrying.  He’ll be running as soon as he gets the message, you know it.  You know it as sure as you breathe.

You’ve just got through getting your hair in a tie and knotting it up behind your head when you feel the first subtlest hum in your horns and know it for what it is.  He still vents off that thrill of power when he’s out of control, and for all you know it doesn’t make a real sound as could be heard, you’d swear you hear a _hsssssss_ of his voodoos ringing down your vertebral column. 

He has the permissions to open your door, doesn’t need to wait for you to open it like anybody else would, but there’s still a wait.  You start to get back up on your feet again, stop at the strain in your legs, start to try again—fuck, what do you even show him for his first sight of you, where and what and how should this be done, you should have taken time to think—

The door opens, and Gamzee comes in, head down, eyes on the ground, not daring yet to look up for you.

You have been dreaming him hurt, bleeding unwanted, dying alone, poisoned, stabbed, torn open and in halves, you’ve been dreaming him dead and hurting for a time that felt eternal and seeing him whole as he walks in your room feels almost more a dream than those did.  Your heart beats harder a second—harder and all wrong, fast flutters that don’t pump and make your head spin a second.  You stand up to go to him and he turns from the door and sees you.

He’s across the room so fast you don’t hardly see him move, across the room and grabbing to you so hard you nearly lose your feet from under you.  You go back a step and have to hit out to lean on the wall, and he hits you in the thorax with the flat of one bony little fist, buries his face in your chest and punches and then slaps and then his hand just drags down your thorax and knots in your shirt, and he’s shaking.  You put fronds to him as gentle as you know how; he sniffs and pounds your thorax again, but it’s all weak and his breathing goes tremble-shake in and out of him 

“ _You keep the ship floating while I was out, little one?_ ” 

He makes a little whine of a noise in your front, presses his face to you like a grub and tugs on you like he can get closer than close.  You touch  his head, and you get struck then by how long it’s been since you touched him—you run your fingers slow through his hair and he growls but pulls you closer and closer.

“…Gamzee,” you say, but it’s more a sigh than a call and he don’t answer at his name, just gives you another growl, the wettest little growl.  He’s mad you think, a bit, he’s mad at you, _how dare you get hurt you fucker_ —how you were mad after your sister Tresor died, mad because you were _so fucking scared._ You fit the back of his head in your hand, spread your other hand across his back and rub slow circles there.

“— _you—fucking—_ ” Gamzee sniffs and chokes and shudders up against you and he’s not little anymore but he feels small now.  Just now he’s diminished. 

You want to stand and hold on to him for the rest of ever, right this second, but there’s no way for that to be.  You can’t stay here standing too long, you can’t, you been off your feet for weeks and you weren’t barely standing when Vantas was here, just for the spite of him.  But you don’t want to spite Gamzee, and you are fucking _weak_ now.  You are brought low.

You’re trying to figure if you should tell him so (don’t like it, don’t like it at-fucking-all, looking _weak_ and shit but…) or if you should just let go too early, maybe hurt his heart but make it up to him when you find a place to sit your ass down, when he makes the choice for you.  He moves real fast, snaps back to breathe and stares at you and then reaches up and pulls you down to kiss you.  For a second you are stupidly, simply fucking _happy._

Then you lean down to really get into him and your left leg just up and fucks right off.

You go over forward on one knee and he swears something foul and catches you as he best can, helps you down.  He couldn’t lift you, but he can support and ease, he can bear your weight.  You’d be lucky right this second if you could say the same.  Fucking hell, how did you let down for one minute, how did you drop the guard that’s made you survive all these sweeps?  You were at ease and it almost made you leave him.  Almost made you leave all of them.  All of this, all the family and hell, all the shitblood empire as needs cold hands to set them straight.  It’ll be a fucking blessing undeserved if you live through the weakness that follows. 

But Gamzee is looking at you sad and scared and eyes wide and so you don’t say a single word of that whole shit out loud.

“Fine,” you say, before he can make inquiry.  “Just—motherfucking fine.  I’ve only been an hour awake, little one, this shit came and now I’ll have it be gone again.”

“You should get back off your feet,” he frets at you, and you snort and get yourself back up, more careful this time.  Plant your feet and stand solid on them.  More care, less throwing yourself around kissing your matesprit.  That’s…fine.  You’ll bide by that for now.  “You should—come on, lets get you on back to—”

“You are not needed to get me _any_ place,” you say, nettled and cool, and still you stand as another trembling rush goes down your aching back and through your legs.  “I’m no sick grub, little one.  No weak-ass wriggler, this motherfucker.”

He opens up his mouth—closes it again.

“…yeah,” he says.  “…but…would still feel better if you got your settle down on.”  He lets go your arm, but slides his hand on down to yours, watches his fingers twist through yours instead of looking up at your face.  “…’n maybe then I kinda want…” his  eyes go sliding off to one side.  His ears flick and go all purple.  “…other.  Stuff.”

You laugh, then cough, then wheeze a bit and go back to laughing.  “And here’s me,” you get out, “—thinking you had _concern_ for me and all…”

He purples some more—you wish you could see him under his paint, but you don’t want to go for that now.  Too tired, not long enough awake, you can barely even get the rest of you under control and you are so goddamn tired.  Don’t think you could fuck him now properly if you tried. 

“Not, like—” he waves his hands around, _no no not like that_ “—no, brother, come on, I just—”

You remember the brief moment you were kissing him, how fucking good it felt after all your bad dreaming and hurting and the handmaid clawing your back.  You soften a bit.

“I know,” you tell at him, and he squeezes your hand.  “Well aware.  And _you,_ ” you remember all of a sudden, something important and most fucking necessary.  “—you and all my little faithful, all of you gonna go and get your listen on of my kin Untoxxic.  Just ‘cause that drink got put in your hands before it came to me that didn’t make it safe, that shit is not a power you have.  Never take a drink or a bite to eat as hasn’t come from church fleet or been eaten by every other color around you.  I forgot.”

He winces a little bit to hear you talk so careless on the poisoning, but nods with his ears back and swings your fronds a little bit between you.  His face is all hopeful.  That, you figure, is the most of the schoolfeeding you’re set to get done tonight.

“…okay, fine,” you say, and  touch his horns, up the tender curl of them with your fingers.  You ache.  God, you ache like you been beat to hell and back.  It’s just a thing to say, _fighting the handmaid_ but still you almost figure like you can feel where she raked at you.  “I’m not up to fuck you right now though.”

He laughs.  “—it’s gone past midday,” he says.  “Wouldn’t argue if you wanted, but sure as fuck not gonna motherfucking argue if you don’t.”

…and you note that his paint is still on, no slime in his hair, and frown a bit.  He did used to make bad his sleeping times, but he was better.  Vantas had him in the ‘coon almost regular-like.  What the fuck went down here? 

Vantas did look all tired and worn now, didn’t he?  You didn’t note beyond to wonder if it gave him reason to just fucking _walk out_ after bitching at your jokes like the heretic motherfucker he is.  Huh.

But that’s not for right now, and not for today.  You walk on back into your back block, into the sleepy fake sun.  It wouldn’t burn you, not this fake warm shit, and back when you got here first it fucked you up, some gut part of you always screeching _you’ll burn you’ll burn fuck fuck fuck you’ll_ burn.  But you’ve gotten on to liking it.  Makes a lazy sleepiness go through you to set down in the warm.

It’s a relief to sit down in the end too; fronds get all wobbly the longer you’re up and when you settle down it feels nice as hell on your aching spine.  Gamzee looks at the sun glow and hesitates a second, then sighs and follows you down, wincing away from the light and warm.

You’re about to start on him about the light, teach him it’s safe and shit, but then he looks up at you and his face does that— _thing,_ that awful fucking thing where it crumples up and his ears flick back, and he leans up and kisses you again and that’s that you got nothing worth saying that’s more important.  You lay back and pull him on top of you in the sun instead, and he goes still and then goes _mmmm_ into your lips and curls his legs up into the light too.

For a time after that all you do is lie there and let the light and the warm make you sleepy and his kisses make you content inside.  It’s sweet and good and after your bad dreams it’s a blessing, and Gamzee’s hand rests on your chest.  He’s breathing time with you.  Got his hand on your thorax over your pump biscuit and as he leans in your shoulder and sighs out you feel his fingers tap time with its beat. 

And then all of a sudden your pusher skips and flutters again.  Breathing chokes, your whole worn-out corpse goes still like on a signal, waiting for it to end and Gamzee’s hand goes still and you know he’s felt it.  It settles again.  You take a breath, and another.  Settle still and wait, but it seems done for the moment and now Gamzee is looking entirely too fucking freaked.

“Sorry,” he says, and you think idle in some part of your thinkpan on how that’s a thing he’s never quite managed to stop doing, apologizing for shit that wasn’t him.  “Fuck, sorry—what the hell was—?”

“It’ll fade.”

“But—”

“It’ll _fade._ ”  And if nothing else makes it so, you’ll go to Meenah and suffer her hand on you with that godawful pan-splitting light that heals all and everything.  Having that happen over and over, that shit you won’t bear, but to fix this?  To fix the things done to you that scare him, sure, why the fuck not.  You look at his face, and you see him afraid—softens you inside, where any other you’d want to hit them and say _shape the fuck up._   Pity’s a beautiful goddamn thing. 

“Hey now.”

Gamzee blinks flap at you all dazed and then sighs out a breath, long and slow.  “Uh,” he says, and takes another breath.  Another sigh.  “Fuck.  If—I just…” he presses palm to your thoracic struts, feels your pusher pound.  He’s chewing at his lips again, and them already kinda ragged and scarred up—has Vantas not been stopping him on that now?  He’s been stopping him before, Gamzee’s lips were all healing up…

But you’re tired, and he’s tired, and you don’t wanna ask him about Vantas now.  That nubby little shout-bag is the last fuckin’ thing you wanna apply sponge-power to.  You pull him back down again instead, and for a long while you just lie there and love.

You don’t realize you’re drifting off again until he goes “… _Kurloz_?” kinda quiet and worried, and you jerk and blink and realize you went still.  Eased off back to something like sleep, so slow you didn’t even notice you stopped kissing him.  He’s looking down on you, all big eyes and worry—you ruffle up his hair.  Getting long, goddamn.  You wonder if he means it to be, if he’s grow it out as long as yours.  You think he likes it shorter, what you’ve seen, maybe he’s just not gotten to getting it cut. 

“…’m fine,” you say, and he does not look convinced.  You laugh.  “Really.  Slept so long and deep I went and made myself tired again, ‘s all.”  You yawn, big and deep and long, and settle back.  Goddamn but it’s comfortable here.  Don’t want to get up to ‘coon.  “…we should both be getting our snooze on.”

He sighs.  Shifts a little around, like he don’t notice he’s doing it, and catches his breath.  His legs wrap around your thigh.  Toes of one foot curl against your ankle.  Oh, fuckin’ precious.  Fucking _priceless._ Messiahs but he’s cute.

“Got a look a little restless on you there,” you say, and he tenses up and then looks down at himself grinding down on your thigh and goes all purple in the ears.  You laugh.  “You wanna get off?”

He starts to open his mouth, say something all _you look plenty tired_ and _I’ll be fine, bro,_ and you shift your tired bones to dig your claws into his ass.  He doesn’t catch the moan.  He does look all purple and shamed after, though, and he starts to speak again, _can do it myself_ and _sorry_ (why the fuck?) _sorry…_

“Here’s what I _can_ do for you,” you say, and reach out a hand at the box you keep by the platform.  He shuts up, and the look on his face is wonderful when you bring out a needle, long and wicked-sharp but thin.  He looks so sad, like he wanted more—wriggler still thinks bigger is the only way.  _Well_ , you congratulate yourself in the back of your pan, _you’re making that more every time he’s with you_. But you’ll disprove him on that. “Sit real still now.”

It’s a careful thing, this, and you pull him up in your lap for it, trail the needle down over his back.  For all his disappointment he shivers at the feel of it dragging down his skin, moves slow and soft against you.  You don’t get it right every time, and you haven’t had time to learn all the points you could go for, but there’s one you think you can find for sure and you trail your fingers over his back and follow it with the needle-tip to make him breathe just that little bit harder into your shoulder.

“ _There’s some places to beat and break,_ ” you murmur in his ear, and touch his shoulders where you’ve bruised him, the curve of his back, looking for just the right spot.  You know you’ve found it when you feel him twitch, not even so much as to make him catch his breath, just the jump of muscles under his skin, and you touch the tip of the needle to the place, find the right angle.  “… _some places need a little…”_

You drive the needle down sharp and sudden and he _howls_ , his whole arm seizes and jerks.  When you tap the hold on the end of the needle, it jerks around like he’s a puppet on fucked-up strings, and he gasps and pants and tries so hard to stay still.

“…precision,” you finish, like a motherfucking badass.

“What the fuck,” he says, all breathless, and reaches back with his good arm to the needle in his back—when he touches it his other arm does that cute little spasm again and his eyes roll and flutter half-shut.  “— _oh—_ fuck, what the fuck, what—”

“It’s all in knowing a body,” you say, and close your eyes as you trail a hand down his front, imagine the spots you’ve mapped out.   “…nerves and shit.  Still working on it.”

He grins at you so big and bright.  “Bitchtits,” he says, all awed.  You laugh and flick the needle again and he gasps and seizes up. 

“Might maybe put some power through them,” you say, thinking out loud, and play your hands easy across his bulge, barely thinking about it.  “…could make it to shock, vibrate…all number of nasty shit.” 

“ _Fuck,_ ” he says, and you laugh at the look on his face, all wondering and young.  He jumps at the noise and looks at you, and when he looks at you it’s not just pain that twists his face up.  “—fuck.” He leans in, wincing slow, and kisses you again, hungry for you, needing.  “ _Missed you,_ ” he says, and his hand finds yours and spasms tight, you can feel the muscles jerk in his hand as the needle digs at him.  “ _I fuckin’ missed you you were off so far away for so long…_ ”

You remember your dreams, the way others hurt him behind your eyes and he begged for you to come save him, how you couldn’t ever quite get to him and how you couldn’t ever quite touch him, and you squeeze his hand back and pull him down against you, hold him close and let him bury his face in your shoulder as he fights the trembling sobs in the pit of his thorax.  He was hurting, in your head.  He was hurting over and over again and not by your hands and he was scared and you felt like it would fucking kill you.

“… _missed you too,_ ” you say in his ear, and rock him a little, let him move slow against you and shudder.  “We’re good now.  Shit’s going to be just fucking fine.  _It’s okay now._ ”

You work a hand down between you to touch him again, and he tenses and gasps and then slumps down and lets you touch him, making these tiny, gasping sobs that absolutely fuck you up on the inside.  How does he _do_ that, how does he—just by holding to you and shivering, he gets inside you and makes you hurt.

You take him to the edge long and slow and gentle and kiss him as he comes, pull his hair to bite his throat as gentle as you know how.  The whole time he stays tight against you.  The whole time he holds on like he can’t live without your skin and smell and touch, and he whispers _I missed you I missed you I fucking missed you_ Kurloz—fuck—!

You press your hand down as you take the needle out, and he gasps and then goes still.  His hand’s trembling against yours quiets.  You press your fingers down to staunch off what blood might come and kiss him again, and he sobs.

“… _didn’t mean to leave you like that,_ ” you say, and remember a different time, another time you held him, another time he cried.  “… _shit wasn’t your fault._ ”  You squeeze him a little tighter.  “… _your dad wasn’t any of yours either,_ ” you say, and he shudders and then goes still again.  “…not your fault.  You didn’t fuck up.  It’s _not your motherfucking fault_.”

\--

Gamzee has to go early the next night, because you are a selfish sop and you didn’t make him go back to his ‘coon to sleep.  He’s got a drop on a planet a half-night’s flight away, a laughsassination on some soft teal piece of shit as doesn’t think he needs to follow imperial order.  He knots his hair up before he goes, and you indulge to kiss the back of his neck where it’s bared and then let him go, off into the cold stars to do Her work. 

And you go out.

You were thinking maybe you’d see a couple overcome at the sight of you—you’re a ruler, a support of them, and the few who know you would have cause for real, deep concern, but the others you didn’t figure would care so much. 

It’s one of the rarest, wrongest guesses you ever made.  Wherever you go, folks praise messiahs to see you and reach out to touch your fronds like they can’t believe you’re real.  They missed your sermons, they tell you, they missed seeing you out and around, missed your jokes and your paint and they just fuckin’ missed you, okay, you been here ungodly long and they were so afraid.  They were so afraid for you.  There was never a moment the chapel fell silent from all the praying done for you.

You have to duck out in an empty room after the first couple minutes and just breathe to yourself, and if your thorax is aching up to your hot, prickling eyes, if you feel for the whole family entirely almost as strong then as you do for your quadrants, you’d say that’s right and fucking good.

 _God._   When was the last time you were properly part of the family?  Too motherfucking long. 

Some of the youngest who walk the ship, you’re meeting them now for the first time.  They look up at you all awe and wide eyes, so small, so fucking precious, and you are fair maudlin with all the emotions and shit going around today, you give them a real grin and welcome them on and they look at you with eyes like stars.  You meet back with the schoolfeeders again, trade elixir and trade stories; things have been moving while you were gone.  New wrigglers on the up, making waves, in need of blessing and promoting—you take your notes.

You’re on the walk back to your throne room when you turn a corner and look Halore right in the face.

He’s on his own, walking alone and silent, reading something on a palmhusk—he sees your shadow in front of him and looks partway up to say “…’scuse me,” real quiet and start to step around you.

Then his eyes go wide.

You stay quiet, wait for him to say something first—his eyes trace up you real slow, like he’s scared of every inch, up past your scarred-up arms and up to the sign on your chest and he stops and takes a breath and then looks up at your face with a look you don’t have a name for.  A brother to despair, maybe, and relief, and pain, and hunger, all these things and more that you can’t figure out in that sliver of a second.

Then his eyes drop back to your feet again. 

“… _my lord,_ ” he says, so quiet and so fucking _afraid._   It’s masked as respect, but you know fear, the smell and taste of it, and you look closer on him and see that under his paint, his eye is swelled almost shut.  There’s a cut in his lip.  You remember as you have so many hundreds of fucking times, you remember him falling in next to you in your first scripture feed, remember drone season on its way around again and him offering, how young he’d looked.  How young you were. 

Fuck, but you remember.  And no matter what shit he’s done, however much he’s caused you suffering, you can’t forget.

“…hey,” you say, just that bit too late. “You look like shit.”

He winces and then glances up at you again.  This time his eyes stay a second.  Painful for him, you think, painful to look on you. 

“…as is fitting with how I feel,” he says, quick and formal.  “—my lord—”

“Halore.”

He twitches, shock right through him.  His eyes as he looks up to you are wide.  His eyes as he looks to you are scared.

“Who hurt you?”

He opens his mouth, blinks, closes it again.  Shakes his head.

“…my…moirail.”  Stink of fear, strong and bitter.  You know what happened.  You heard.  You want to hunt her down and teach her some hard lessons.  You hold your peace. 

Looks as like he figured you’d snap at that—he’s surprised when you don’t.  Keeps going, like a man on ice so thin he can see the seadwellers underneath it. 

“…she’s getting better,” he says, real slow.  Real scared.  When he’s got a fear dug in him his eyes go wide like Gamzee’s do.  Fins flick shut and flat like Gamzee’s do.  You hurt.  “Wouldn’t try to hurt him again, I swear—I swear, please.  She’s getting better.”

You don’t answer on his moirail.  You want to have choice words with her, see if you think it’s true how much _better_ she’s getting—just the thought of what she wanted to do makes you all fire and poison inside.  If you’d let Gamzee have that drink—if he’d thrown it back instead of you…

You think on him shaking, seizing, wheezing for air, how he’d claw at himself and you wouldn’t get there soon enough, there’s no way you’d be able to save him…

“… _please,_ ” says Halore, and the voice doesn’t so much shake you from your thoughts as echo over them.  “ _Please—_ Kurloz.  Don’t kill her.”

You breathe, and blink, and come back to.  He’s looking at you full on now.  He’s looking at you with eyes full of pleading and even if you wouldn’t be flushed for him now, you wouldn’t ever be…you got a great and abiding love of your family.  And you fucking _hurt_ for the brother you used to think you were flushed for.

“…It ain’t me you should be talking to,” you say, and put a hand on his shoulder as he closes his eyes and breathes.  “…you know who she tried to kill.  It’s him as decides what we do from here.”

His eyes are full of hurt again, fear—you squeeze his shoulder and he looks at you, still with that pleading in his eyes.

“… _but if you think you’ll be left all adrift now,_ ” you say, real quiet, and he winces from the words, from the pain you do with them.  “If you think he’ll have her taken from you…well, you don’t have the first motherfucking inkling what kind of soft little heart I got for my matesprit.”

He ducks his head all sudden—makes like he’s rubbing at the bridge of his nose, like there’s an ache in his pan.  When he looks back up again his eyes are dry, but the paint is smeared at the corner of his eyes, and you do him the favor of not giving it a second look. 

“…I’m sorry,” he says, and he’s back to himself again, all fast words and sharp and blunt both at the same time.  He looks at somewhere around your shoulder, and doesn’t let his words falter.  “…I didn’t think you would wake up.”

“And you were scared as hell that I would,” you say, and half-smile as he glances up sharp at you.  “…afraid what I’d have done.  You know I’m named for my _vengeance._ ” You put just the slightest snarl on the word and he shivers.  For a second, there’s wanting in his eyes.  You step back. 

“Take care,” you say, and you mean it both for him and for her he’s got hid away, putting her back together.  “You know what you gotta do.”

“Yes,” he says, and he looks none too thrilled at the prospect but he’s got a core of iron in him, Halore Travye.  He’ll live.  “Thank you.”

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas and—gross clown gods help you—you are back.  _Daily checks,_ the empress says, and you couldn’t possibly do anything but obey. 

When you get in this time he’s painted again.  He’s been out and about on the ship, from what you gather; there have been clowns whooping and howling and honking outside your quarters all night, and he’s still wearing the remnants of his fancy formal _go out and meet the family_ outfit, even if he’s taken off the gauntlets and the chitin-plate armor. 

He already seems stronger than when you checked on him yesterday morning.  How dare he.  Fucking highbloods, goddamn fucking resilient _highbloods._  

He looks up when you come in (without knocking, fuck him) and raises his eyebrows at you.

“…buckets go in the storage block,” he says, and goes back to reading from the husktop in his lap.  It has a _HONK IF YOU DRINK BLOOD_ sticker on it, in garish colors that look like something a three-sweep-old would love.  You glare at the sticker and try to pretend your face isn’t burning at the crude insult. 

“Listen,” you say, through gritted teeth.  “How about we don’t fuck up Gamzee’s red quadrants?  Great idea, Karkat!  Let’s listen to our pans instead of our bulges!”

He’s smiling at you, amused and pointed and it’s with a sinking feeling you realize he’s not taking your suggestion to heart at-fucking-all.  Is this flirting?  Are you flirting right now?  “Aw,” he says.  “Little wriggler still gets all _blasphemy-red_ when he talks buckets.”

“Freak,” you say, and he shrugs and you can almost hear the thought, _well I’ve heard that a million times before._   He captchalogues his husktop.

“Fuckin’ ain’t a thing to be embarrassed about,” he says casually, and grins.  “—good fun.”

“It’s _life or death_ ,” you snap, “we can’t all be goddamn _deviants_ like you, you awful piece of behemoth shit, pailing isn’t about _fun_ it’s about _staying alive._ ”

He snorts and holds out a hand.  There’s a flicker of light; you resist the urge to reach for your sickles as a gleaming, polished skull flickers into his palm.  He digs his claws into the eye sockets and gives a cursory tug; the skull cracks in half.  The shards vanish.  There’s a heavy piece of black wood in its place, carved into the shape of a cane and holy shit what the fuck kind of modus is that?  You sneer at him.  His grin in return is a lazy, jagged mockery.

“… _not for your motherfucking_ moirail.”

It hits you like a slap in the face, that _reminder_ that he’s fucking your palemate, that he does things to Gamzee that make him shake and fall apart and that he owns such a huge part of his soul and that they share something that you aren’t part of.  That when they see signs you don’t understand they’ll bow their heads together and you’ll hear those words again, _by messiahs’ mercy, amen._  

You don’t catch the awful, furious noise in time; it comes out of you like acid, burns out of your throat and clatters between your teeth.  The Grand Highblood is still smiling—but he growls back through his teeth, low and self-satisfied.

“Yeah,” you say, and it’s a shot in the dark but the anger behind your eyes is setting you on fire and you have to _hurt_ him— “—not for her Condescension either.”

It was a guess, just a guess, but slowly, his smile falls. “And she’ll have it as she likes,” he says mildly, but his eyes are telling another story, _don’t you fucking dare you little freak_ and you smirk at him like the insufferable shitstain you hope he thinks you are.

“She likes me,” you say, and his smile thins to a sharp, straight line.  There’s a scar over his lip, you notice, and you can see Gamzee’s face in his thin, sculpted, battered features and you fucking _loathe_ him for stealing your moirail’s face.  You step into his space, reckless, and you can see the slightest of shakes in his legs.  He’s still weak from the poison and you should do your duty and get out to report but his fucked-up fins are flaring and his knuckles are silver on the head of his cane and you want to tear into him.  “ _I’m her new favorite._ ”

He moves like a snake striking, grabs you by the front of your uniform and twists around to _slam_ your back against the wall.  You choke on the impact and shove at his hands, but you might as well be trying to lift a spaceship.  The stick he was leaning on hits the ground but he doesn’t even seem to notice.  “ _You little upstart,_ ” he snarls, and when he presses you up against the wall you can’t _breathe_ he’s fucking _huge_ and he’s weak from the poison still but just his weight is enough to squeeze the air out of you.  “What got you so high in her eyes?  _What dare you be to him_?  On your back with your legs open and you think she cares—”

“ _She lies around with me afterwards and tells me jokes,_ ” you rasp, and the way he blinks, the way he hides the surprise behind another growl makes a warm little flame flare up in your chest, completely different from the searing heat pounding through the rest of you.  So, that _does_ mean as much as you thought it did.  “—she _told me her name._ ”

He snaps at your face and snarls and then he leans forward and you’re kissing each other—holy fucking shit it’s like being a shuttle in a thunderstorm, there’s so much fucking _power_ there and you want to make it crumble and fall apart .  You want him snarling instead of sneering, panting instead of laughing that cold, mocking laugh.  He bites your lip—drags the ends of his fangs over your throat not hard enough to break skin and when he presses his tongue to your pulse you make a horrible sound.  But you aren’t going down, he’s not winning that easily—“ _Ah-ah-ah,_ ” you gasp at him, and pull him away from you by a handful of the hair around one horn—he winces at the pain before he can stop himself and snarls at the reproach.  “… _better not leave anything my_ moirail _might get_ upset _about._ ”

He stiffens and then bristles.  Your pusher throbs— _not your moirail you piece of filth you fucked that up he doesn’t want you anymore—_ but hormones have taken the place of common sense and when you mention Gamzee you can _see_ the furious twist of his lip, the dilation of his pupils.  “You piece of _filth—_ ”

“—anything I’d have to _calm him down about_ —”

“—shit-blooded blasphemy-spitting—”

“— _you still can’t rub his horns, can you_?”

“Fuck you!”  It’s a real, deep snarl, and this time it’s less a kiss than both of you trying to bite the other one’s lip first, all clashing teeth and growling and then you’re kissing again and you feel like your insides are _boiling._   God _damn_.  You squeeze one of his horns hard, and he can’t quite catch a moan in the back of his throat—he chokes over it with a growl, but he can’t pretend it never happened.

 _“—jealous you—_ you—” fuck you can’t breathe, your breath chokes in your chest and you have waxy paint on your lips, an awful mockery of tyrian where his purple mixes with your fucked-up red. “—you have to—tie him up to see him helpless—and I can do it just by touching him— _FUCK—!_ ”

His arm tenses—his hand squeezes your ass again, grinding just his fingertips into your nook and you spasm and shake all over and then hate yourself at the noises that come out of you. 

“And I can see you _helpless_ with a touch too, _wriggler,_ ” he sneers, and you _hate_ him.

“…milord?”

Somebody is knocking on the door.  Both of you freeze, then glare at each other.  His hand has slipped away from your nook again, and thank god now you can breathe, think, plan an attack.

“What’s your needing, brother?”  He calls out, and you shift your leg very slowly and then jam it hard between his, rubbing harshly—his breath catches in this fucking _amazing_ little choking sound.  You can feel his bulge, holy fucking shit you don’t want to think about it but your brain keeps laughing hysterically _how is Gamzee not torn in half_ —it gets a hoarse, jagged noise out of him and it feels like victory.

“…uh…” the person outside the door sounds taken aback.  “…day sermon’s started, your Hilarity.  Unless you’d rather a brother told them you weren’t up to show…?”

“ _Fuck,_ ” he hisses to himself, and then grinds his teeth as you rub your leg up and down, teasing.  “ _I’m gonna tear you limb from motherfucking stubby little limb you little—_ ”

“Milord?”

“I’ll be there di-fuckin’-rectly!”  He slams you up against the wall again and his weight is a solid, immovable mass, his breath is cool against your neck.  “ _I’ll deal with you later,_ little one.”  And you know what the name is, you know, you’ve heard him call Gamzee that before, and both of you know the dig for what it is.  You snarl and he kisses you again, all teeth and tongue and it’s like getting slammed by a sunflare, it shakes you all over and lights you up with pure, aching _hate_.  “ _I’ll deal with you later._ ”

“You piece of shit, I’ll be gone when you get back!” you snarl back at him, “—I have more important things to do than deal with your stupid posturing, you enormous gross grubfucker!”

“ _You won’t be leavin’ this ship without my saying so,_ ” he hisses.  “ _What would they do if they caught you here, huh?_ ” He tries to grab one of your horns—you turn your head out of his grip and catch his finger in your teeth to give it a single hard, nasty _chomp_ and he grunts and yanks it free, cursing under his breath.

“What would they _think_ if they caught _you_ here?” you echo back at him, and you slick your fingers in freak-red blood from your chewed-up neck and smear it roughly across his face, across his meticulous facepaint.  He flinches away and you miss his mouth and his eyes that you meant to mark, but it goes sloppily across the painted smile and smears the cheekbone and he snaps his fangs, affronted and furious.  “Or do you figure you’d get away with it?  _Does it not count unless the heretic lets you_ fuck _him?_ ”

He takes a sharp, jagged breath and you see his eyes flash sharp red for a second, his pupils visibly open and his teeth bare up to the gum—

…and then he stops. 

He’s breathing like he’s just run a mile, and you’re doing the same thing but worse, god _god,_ you’re…you’re fucking _frightening_ yourself, it feels like your blood is acid, your skin is on fire, your muscles are like wire, you want to _claw_  him and he looks at you slowly and takes a slow breath.

And then he drops you.

You hit the ground hard and uneven and fucking hell he has to stop _dropping_ you, he’s too goddamn tall to drop you like that.  You growl, but he just turns his back on you and goes to the door like you don’t even matter.

He stops just before he opens it and half-turns back toward you.

“…you just go through that door there,” he says, and smiles all sweet at you.  “…hate to have a brother see you and tear you apart, and you here for the empress.”

You fucking _loathe_ him, but you can imagine these stupid clowns seeing you here and legitimately trying to slaughter you for daring to be in his block and you can’t take the chance.  You stand up and back to the room and he nods and goes to the door, scrubbing at his paint with one hand.  As you back through into the block he pointed you to, you hear the door click open and hear his voice, less harsh and not as deep, “—sorry brother, got caught up.”

And then you turn around and see where you are, and your stomach turns over.  You’re in a dark block, plain and black with more ‘paint’ splattered on the ceiling in swirls, but you’re used to the awful bloody mess on every available surface, that’s not the problem.

The problem is the pailing platform sitting a few feet from you in the center of the block, the ominous box sitting next to it and oh _god,_ there’s a pail sitting right there next to it, he’s _ready_ , he’s set up to use this fucking block and you know who he’s going to be using it with.

You stare at the platform with your mouth hanging open, outraged and humiliated, for almost a minute.  Then, slowly, your feet start to move but it’s not out, it’s further in, further toward the flat, cushioned surface and the black box.  The box’s lid is cracked open, and your hands shake as you reach out and slip your fingers inside, pry the heavy lid slowly up. 

It’s got a tray, a top layer coated with something soft and black that cradles the things inside and keeps them from jolts and shocks.  Needles, four dark vials marked with nothing but letters and numbers. _A1010_ , _H-0_ , _S_ , and _P510_ in neat, sharp handwriting.  The A and S vials are tiny.  The P and H vials are almost big enough to be jars, and “H” is still sealed with purple wax, stamped with a sign that almost looks familiar.  All of them are carefully cushioned in black fabric.

You consider breaking them just to spite him, and then think better of it—god only knows what’s in there, and if he sent you in here on purpose you can’t discount the possibility that they’ll—fucking— _explode_ or some shit.  ( _And what if they’re here to make your moirail happy, what if he’ll love these, god what a situation you’ve put yourself in—_ )  You pick up “H-0” cautiously and turn it around in your fingers—there are no other markings on the vial itself, but there is a note attached, in awful handwriting that you have to read from inches away.  Whoever wrote it did a _shitload_ of scribbling-out, but eventually you piece together the message under all the jagged scrawling.

_1 Full/2hh sixxty min aprxx where we dixxuxxed, play safe brother - KM_

…well that’s _helpful,_ says the sarcastic asshole in the back of your head, _nice sleuthing, Vantas._ You ignore it and pick up the first layer of the box, hearing the little jewel-like clinks as the tiny syringes roll against each other, and set it carefully to one side.

The second layer down looks like an impromptu emergency mediculler kit—but light on the ‘cull’ part, all bandages and bottles and a few meticulously clean curved needles in different sizes with neat loops of thread attached to them.  Styptic gel.  Wound tape.  Jolts—you’ve been jolted before, they picked you to demonstrate on in Threshecutioner training, and you still remember the feeling like you were going to burst out of your own skin.  Pure enervative hormones right to the blood-pusher.  Fucking evil things.  God, those are for…what, excessive blood loss, shock.  Prepared for anything, isn’t he?

And then you move aside that layer as well, and almost drop it. 

You knew, okay, you _knew_ what their relationship was like and you’re 100% sure that Gamzee’s telling you the truth about pain, about how he hasn’t found an upper limit on what he enjoys, on _everything_ he’s told you, but—but there it is in front of you and it’s like a punch to the gut.  Knives of all sizes laid out in meticulous rows, little clever _vicious_ tools you don’t know the use of, straight, long needles, clamps and screws and pliers, knotted cords and long leather straps darkened at the ends and worn at the handles.  Right beside them like they’re in _any fucking way the same,_ pailing toys, evil little things to tease but never satisfy, fucking _massive_ shit that even Gamzee doesn’t seem big enough for.  And sitting at an angle on top like he was working before he went out for the night, like he was _in here setting up_ , there’s a razor-thin knife with a viciously sharp black blade and a polishing cloth with stains of old purple blood on it.

Your stomach knots at the thought of how easily that blade would cut through even highblood skin, at the thought of your moirail tied down and gasping with that blade trailing over his skin like the parody of a lover’s touch, leaving lines of blood behind it—

You slam the second layer back down with shaking hands and back away, and even though you _know_ Gamzee loves this, in your mind he’s screaming and your pan can’t read that as pleasure, it just—it’s not—

You shove the top layer back into the box, slam it shut again and run, out of the pailing block, out of the main block, out into the ship itself with its maze of corridors and unfriendly, painted faces.  You pull out your palmhusk and your hands are shaking but you slam out _WHERe r u_ and a second later you get back a question mark and _scripture library, WHAT THE FUCK’S UP WITH YOUR TEXT?_

You barely manage to hold still long enough to pull up your map.  Then you run.

There’s a clown at the entrance to the library—he starts to say something about heretics and permission and you plow past him like he’s not there and sprint into the dark, cool room beyond.  You vaguely notice a huge, high-arched room, data-encryption grubs around the walls, places to sit and people with their husktops out in a circle before you see a familiar pair of horns and sprint forward, panting, aeration sponges on fire and eyes watering and Gamzee looks up from his palmhusk, worried but smiling, whole and not screaming and not _hurting_ and—

“Karkat?”  He sounds startled, his eyes are wide and confused, you haven’t made up and haven’t even started to say what needs to be said, but you don’t have time to worry about it.  You skid to a half, not sure, standing over him and shaking. Your mouth is gasping “ _I can’t fucking—I can’t—I—_ ”and Gamzee makes hoarse noises of distress and catches you up into his arms like nothing has changed, rocking side to side with your face in his cool shoulder.  Your skin feels like it’s _burning_ , your pan throbs like it’s full of boiling air and your thoughts spin and stop and start again, out of order and frenzied.  You’re barely aware you’re breathing deep and fast and ragged, barely making fragments of words—

“Karkat!”  Gamzee sounds petrified—his hand rubs big circles on your back and you take a huge gasp of breath, struggling to get rid of the dizzy spinning in your thinkpan—you must be out of air, you need more air—but it just makes you dizzier, you’re shaking all over.  “Karkat, brother—holy shit—”

The other clowns are getting up and moving around, but you don’t have time for them—Gamzee’s here and he’s safe and your eyes and pan and pusher are full of knives, ropes, whips, needles—he moves a little and you hold on to him so tight he hisses through his teeth like you’re hurting him, his arms twitch under your vice-like grip. 

“ _Brother, cup your hands over his mouth and,_ ” somebody says, and you lose the rest of the words because your fingers find the scar on his shoulder and imagining how the knotted flesh under your fingers got there makes a few more of your ragged nerves _snap._   You sob, almost as completely and utterly fucking freaked out by your body’s reaction as what caused it, gasping and shaking and oh god is this how you die, do you just pop your bloodpusher like a grape—

Cool hands frame your face, form a mask over your mouth and nose and Gamzee buries his face in your hair and shooshes shakily.  Your own breath washes back over your face—you pant and gasp and slowly some of the dizziness dies away, some of the panic shuts off.  At least you don’t feel like you’re going to literally fucking _die_ anymore.  You’re still shaking all over, awful sobs are still shuddering through you—your nutrition sac churns and your blood-pusher pounds through your whole body.

“ _Shhh, brother shh_ —” he rocks you back and forth and you sob like a wriggler into his shirt.  “Karkat, best friend what happened?”  And then, fiercer, _colder_ , it always takes you by surprise—“—kin didn’t hurt you did they, nobody went and—?!”

You shake your head and his fingers touch your chewed up lip and your shoulder—it hurts, stings sudden and sharp and you realize there’s small patches of freak blood on your uniform’s shoulder, Kurloz’s claws sunk through right to the flesh he was holding you so hard and you didn’t even notice and the stab of anger at him for messing up your uniform is so sudden and mismatches so badly with the awful feelings of being _you_ it almost makes you laugh.  It comes out a strangled groan.

Gamzee hesitates a second, holding you, looking around—his hand creeps up to your head, petting your hair.  “… _Karkat,_ ” he says next to your ear, soft and almost embarrassed, and the cool weight on your hair feels so _good_ , so nice and soothing and you close your eyes and focus on not flipping the fuck out any more than you already are.  “— _I—I know we ain’t alone, not proper alone, not really, but—_ fuck _, brother,_ can I…?”  And his fingers frame one horn through your hair, gentle, cool pressure that makes your sobs catch in your chest.  The other clowns have fucked off, the room is big and empty and full of the awful noises you’re making bouncing back at you, and now there’s nobody there to see you want this more than you possibly have words for.

“ _Yeah,_ ” you get out, “—fuck, yeah, yes, please—” and then his fingers knead into the base of your right horn and your whole body tries to relax all at the same time.  Your breathing turns into a harsh, shuddering gasp—he croons and keeps rocking you slowly, giving you affection the only way he knows how, stumbling over comforting words and stroking clumsily at every part of you he can reach.  You can tell seeing you upset is freaking him out, his breathing is fast and shaky as he holds you, but he doesn’t let go and he doesn’t stop.

It takes a long time to smooth out your shaking, to get rid of the panic swirling around your thinkpan and make your thoughts start to make sense again, but Gamzee doesn’t let go of you the whole time.  When you finally manage a deep breath and sit up a little straight, scrubbing at your face, he keeps his hands on you like he’s afraid if he doesn’t support you you’ll fall apart again. 

“Fucking hell,” Gamzee says weakly, and you rub at your face and try not to look at him.  “What happened?  Bro, your mouth—”  His fingers trace your grossly swollen lip—you wince and he pulls his fingers away quickly, chirring softly in distress.

“Uh,” you say, and you touch your lip as well—it’s still bleeding, you chew it when you’re upset and on top of the damage the Grand Highblood did it’s swelling up to a pretty good size.  “Fuck, it’s—I wasn’t—I wasn’t planning on being here, okay, I would’ve told you, the empress sent me to see if…to check on…” you stop, and his eyes fix on your lip.  His brows furrow.  “…to check on the…Grand Highblood.”

“…and did you see him?”  he’s talking slow, eyes still fixed on your bruises and cuts, like his pan is somewhere far away.  Fuck, he knows, he _knows,_ just tell him—

“Yeah,” you say, and he takes a deep breath and lets it back out again, drags his hands down his face.  “—listen, I know you don’t like—”

“You don’t know what you’re getting _in_ on,” he’s mumbling to himself, and you wince at how awful his voice sounds, worn out and worried, “—the shit you’re messing with, best friend—”

“Listen, I know he’s dangerous—”

“He could _hurt you_ ,” Gamzee says, and his hand closes on your arm, urgent and worried, “—he could hurt you real motherfuckin’ bad, brother, without even trying or thinking on it he could—” he stops, looking wretched.  “…don’t know what I’d do,” he says, and you can hear the imagined agony darkening his voice, see the thought clouding his eyes.  “…can’t contemplate, brother, please don’t—”

“Shhh—”

“Don’t _shoosh_ me on this when I’m tryin’ to motherfucking _keep you alive_!” You flinch but he doesn’t seem to notice—his hand squeezes on your arm and you grunt at the throb of pain that runs right up to your shoulder at that, but he doesn’t seem to notice that either—the sound of him breathing fast and shallow, the feeling of his trembling, it’s all setting you off too, making your head spin again.  You’re both shaking.  “What am I supposed to fucking _do_ if that happens, brother?!”

“I thought you trusted him, I thought that was what you fought over last—”

“I trust him with _me_!”

 “—Gamzee, listen—”

“What if—”

“Gamzee, _listen_.”

“—even think on it, best friend—”

“GAMZEE MAKARA SHUT YOUR BLITHERING CARTILAGINOUS BLUSTER-FLAP AND LISTEN TO YOUR GODDAMN MOIRAIL.”

Gamzee’s mouth snaps shut.  You glare at him, panting a little, and then force yourself to take a deep, deep breath and let it out again. 

“If you’re so _worried,_ ” you say, and this is probably a dumb idea but you’re reckless in the aftermath of terror, you’re angry and scared and you doubt yourself enough, the last thing you need is him doubting you too.  “Why don’t we go and _ask_ him?”

\--

Gamzee spends the entire walk up to the upper levels trying to make you reconsider every interaction you’ve ever had with his ancestor.  You walk so fast you’re almost running, keep your head down and slam forward past anybody who tries to get in your way.   Gamzee comes around behind you, trying to get you to listen but unwilling to grab you and make you stop. 

“He was supposed to preach tonight,” you say, recklessly loud, ignoring Gamzee’s distressed muttering.  “Where would he be?”

“Uh,” he says, “—he’s—the—chapel, uh—bro, you can’t—Karkat no you fucking _can’t—!_ ”

“Watch me.”  You know where the chapel is—you’re close.  You start up the stairs toward the door, hearing the sounds of fleet life die off around you as you enter the no-talking zone that surrounds the flagship’s biggest place of bullshit clown worship—

Gamzee picks you up right off your feet and drags you back with one hand over your mouth, pulling you back away from the doors and into a room across the hall.  You struggle, but he’s strong, _much_ stronger than you and you can feel his hands shaking at the effort of restraining himself.  His grip keep tightening until it hurts, then easing off again as he gets control, then tightening again until you gasp around his fingers.

“ _Blasphemy, brother,_ ” he hisses in your ear as soon as you’re out of the corridor, and there’s real _anger_ in his voice, his thorax trembles behind you with every breath.  “ _Just because your angry little self wants to_ make points at me _, best friend you do not_ step _on what I hold dear in my pusher, do_ fucking NOT.”

He lets you go and backs away, breathing hard, leaning on a table and raking his hands through his hair as you turn to stare at him.  And…for a second you see the look on his face, and you don’t recognize him.  That’s what snaps you out of it, the look on his face, the tense worry and fear and _anger_ there makes you shiver and sends something like icy water down your back. 

You did this.  You _do_ this over and over again, and just because it’s your opinion that his bullshit religion is bullshit or that imperial control is more important than the other members of his cult, that doesn’t mean you get to stomp all over it, _fuck_ you’re becoming the overpossessive piece of shit who tells their moirail who and what they can like and believe and tries to model them into a perfect little copy of themselves and _uses_ them you’re the awful abusive moirail who gets replaced by somebody pretty and sweet and well-matched, it’s you—

And then Gamzee puts his hand over your mouth and you realize that those words were coming out of your mouth.  You stare at each other for a few seconds, and there’s a guarded, awful look on his face.  His lip trembles for a second, his mouth opens and then, slowly, closes again. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, and it comes right from the core of you, tears through you on the way.  “I—I’m really fucking sorry.” And you know that he knows you’re not just talking about almost barging in on the service.  His face softens. 

“You…you found her though.” 

Your guts clench up.  “No,” you say, and he stares at you as you reach out, cupping his thin cheek in one hand.  “You don’t have to talk yourself out of being pissed off at me—b— _beloved._ ” The name that comes so easily from him chokes in your mouth, but it makes his eyes widen and then brighten, strangely wet.  “Gamzee, you’re allowed to be pissed off at me for being an absolute bulge-blister, even if in the end it worked out okay, I still fucking— _hurt_ you on the way.  Now you tell me, _are you mad at me_?”

He makes half a noise—stops, starts again.  “…yeah,” he says finally.  “…yeah, can’t…rightly say I’m not, best friend.”

You knew it, but it still hurts.  You nod.  “…okay,” you say, a little bit shaky.  “And…you can forgive me?”

He nods, fast and hard and eager.  “Yes,” he says, “Yeah, best friend, I know what you did, I know.”

The words make your insides close up.  The noise that comes out of you is far from dignified, and when he reaches out a hand and strokes your hair it just shakes you more. 

“I’m sorry,” you say again, and again, your voice keeps cracking ( _knives and whips and ropes but you’re the one that hurts him, you’re the one who—_ )  “I’m sorry, I’m—really fucking sorry, I—had to, I thought—I wanted to… _fix_ this, I wanted to… _fuck,_  I just wanted to…I knew I was hurting you, but I just…kept…god—”

He pulls you closer and holds on to you, so tight it’s hard to breathe but not tight enough.

“…we can wait for him here,” he says, and you can tell he’s still not happy but he’s not fighting over it anymore either.  His hands run over your hair and trace your horns and then leave for a second to tap something out on the screen of a palmhusk.  “…he’ll see that when he’s done.  Fuck, what a motherfucking morning…”

“…sorry,” you say again, and the word seems to come out that much easier now that you’ve said it once.  That’s…good.  Right?  That’s good.  It’s good, you should know how to be sorry to him.  How to accept that he was right and you fucked up.  You hold on to him, and he puts his face in your hair and you know he knows he doesn’t need to answer.


	20. Cult of Flesh

Day service ain’t long, but it feels long, you sitting there holding Karkat and wondering why the fuck you didn’t get to talking this out before. He’s all tired and squirmy and cute as fuck and when you kiss his horns, and you really wanna drag him off to a pile.

But then you think on the hurts you’d fix up if you were on a pile, and how he got them, and Kurloz’s precious claws in his precious flesh, and you go all tight and worrying again. You trust him to care for you so good, trust him to love and hold and ease, but Karkat ain’t family and you’ve seen a real killing hate between them before. Less as much now, less so than before, but…

You don’t hear voices when service lets out—service or not, the place outside this door is holy and they keep their riot and rampage low. There’s to be a hell of a do later, you know. They’re gonna tear this shit up, celebrate Kurloz back on his feet. But for now all you hear is soft feet on metal. Folks hopping a bit around as they put their shoes back on. Noises you know. You can almost close your ganderflaps and imagine how it would feel, the pumping of pusher and blood from the sermon riling you up, slow and fading now that the silence has fallen again, soft feeling of brothers and sisters clacking your horns all gentle with theirs. Feeling of your bare feet on the metal. The lights through the colors, all the colored lanterns dangling down low and swaying at the way folks down below move and stir the air…

Karkat elbows you in the thorax. You cough and jump and wake, then remember him there in your arms, the fact of his sweet little face as he said “sorry” at you and meant it, and you squeeze him a little, lost in your thinkpan still. He squirms around and grumbles.

“ _Gamzee,_ ” you hear finally—he’s been saying words for a while now, right. You blink and go “mmm?” “Gamzee for god’s sake. You’re embarrassing m—yourself again.”

“Ain’t give a fuck, bro,” you say, and put your face in his hair and settle to drift off into thoughts again. “… _we should head back to my block, my pile needs warming up…_ ”

“Gamzee!” His voice is rising up to a little shriek now. He’s going all heated up under your hands. “God!”

“Figure what he’s trying to say, little one,” says a voice, all soft and deep and _unfuckingexpected_ and you jump and bare fangs. “—is that you _just fuckin’ pinged me_ all of ten minutes ago, and when I get here there you are gettin’ your wild indecency on. Slow your motherfuckin’ roll.”

Kurloz has got his preaching coat on, old and bloody-splattered and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His arms are ropes and steel bars all built together gorgeous. You grin at him and cuddle Karkat up like a comfort object until he starts wheezing and you get your wicked know on of how fragile his thorax is and that you’re squeezing just a _little_ too hard. You let slack, regretful, and he slides out your arms like a little slitherbeast.

“You cannot be—fucking _cuddling_ me while I try to talk serious shit out with you,” he says, and you remember all sudden-like why you were here and what you were getting your know on of a couple minutes ago. Your smile drops off a bit. You see how Kurloz’s paint is just all smeared up a touch around the lips, how there’s maybe the littlest patch of red blood at the corner of his eye. Miracle-red. Karkat-red. Remember Karkat’s precious bloody arm and his lips bit and chewed up. There’s splits in Kurloz’s too, little things, not as deep, but there. Fuck.

“Calm down,” says Karkat.

You’re just all set to tell him you _are_ motherfucking calm, motherfucker, you two being the ones who are FUCKING UP right now—then you realize. You breathe and calm. A bit. Kinda.

“if you get your figure on I’m chill with your hurting on each other you got only the most rot-panned double-twisted WRONG-THINKING MOTHERFUCKING—”

Okay maybe you don’t calm. They both stare at you as you stand up so fast the table you were on goes flying back and cracks against the floor, and if you weren’t so FUCKING ANGRY and so FUCKING SCARED you would think it was motherfucking hilarious how their faces look alike all wide eyes and staring faces. Did they not figure you’d care, did they not figure you’d MIND, DID THEY NOT FUCKING FIGURE YOU WOULD GET _HEINOUS_ MOTHERFUCKING _OBJECTION_ TO THE THOUGHT OF THEM HURTING EACH OTHER—

Karkat don’t try to shoosh you as you yell at them, and for that you’re grateful because fuck if you’re going to listen to him try to tell you this shit is all okay. You have _salty motherfucking words_ for these two as you love. You have HARSH SENTIMENTS. You have—

“I’m not going to kill him.” Kurloz’s voice cuts through in a way Karkat’s doesn’t, bigger and harsher and more command and power. It’s a voice for preaching and you tense up and freeze, looking at him.

“And I’m not a helpless wriggler,” says Karkat, and when you look at him in his turn he looks pissed off but also he looks at you like you’ve told him something new. Like he’s figured something partway out. “Gamzee, fuck. He’s not some…” he waves his hands around, looking for words, and that’s strange enough in itself you don’t yell again yet. You’re breathing hard like you just ran the whole ship. Your eyes feel hot. “…some all-powerful, infallible god or anything. And I’m not some soft little grub you have to protect from shit. I mean, not that it’s not—” he glances up at Kurloz, goes a little red, keeps going anyway like it’s a defiance. “—not that it’s not—really fucking cute when you do that sometimes, you awful shameless romantic, but I’m _Grand Threshecutioner._ I can take care of myself.”

“All-powerful enough to deal with _you,_ little mutant,” Kurloz contests, but there’s no bite to it. He’s watching you. They both are.

You know. You know a brother’s not helpless, not weak, you depend on that shit, on his rock-hard hold on you, how hot he burns and how fierce. You know Kurloz is just a troll, of fucking course you do. But you remember how he takes you and wrecks you and how cruel he can be and how—motherfucking _ruinous_ to a body he’s not flush for. And Karkat, Karkat’s small and precious and not-yet-pupated and his blood is so bright and fucking beautiful sometimes even you get a want to trace it into the lines of your fronds and Karkat is _bleeding,_ Karkat is bleeding.

You don’t figure out till you see Karkat’s eyes going all shiny and red around the edges and Kurloz’s face soft and quiet under his paint that all that was something you went and said out loud.

“Fuck you,” you finish, but you don’t mean it and you have to turn back away again and try to clean up your eyes without messing your paint all to hell. You’re _scared._ You’re fucking scared. You don’t want either of them hurt, _you’re_ the one as should be hurt, never them. Never ever them. “…’s not like I give a shit.”

Both of them laugh the same moment.

“Little one,” says Kurloz. “I ain’t been told off like that since I was old enough to leave my lusus, like hell you ‘don’t give a shit’.”

“Gamzee,” says Karkat, the same time, “—you massive wreck, are you crying? Goddammit. Come here—come here, you—beautiful idiot, it’s okay. Come here. Shhh…”

You start to try to fight it but then he gets a hot hand on our arm and you break apart for him like you always do and let him pull you ‘round and down and tuck your head up against his neck, bow his head between your horns.

“ _You care too much,_ ” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he minds and you cling to him. Just cling. Just breathe. “You always have. How are you even still alive, oh my god…”

“…ain’t gonna kill him, little one,” says Kurloz again, and there’s a sureness to him when you look up at him over Karkat’s shoulder. Like it’s a promise. “Not even hurt him, not so much as can’t be fixed. Little motherfucker… _entertains._ ” He smiles a half a smile and you notice again that under his paint his lip’s swelled up to match Karkat’s. His eyes are dark over it, his eyes are far off and interested, his eyes are black pits of hunger. There’s such a _heat_ in his eyes and he looks at Karkat so strange. Things been changing and you didn’t notice. Didn’t even contemplate. Karkat frowns at him and he grins back, and there’s a fucking _want_ between them, can’t even contemplate it.

You are reassured and right at the same time all simultaneous-like, you are kind of grossed the fuck out. Seriously though. That shit’s weird.

“Okay?”

That’s Karkat. You blink and look at him and he’s looking at you all motherfucking concern.

“I…” you stop a second, thinking about it, frozen—but Karkat’s squeezing you close and they look at each other different now, and…maybe… “…yeah. Okay. ‘M cool, it’s…okay.”

You see both of them relax and the fact of it is that they _cared,_ the worried what you’d think, and that’s what makes it really almost okay. They’d maybe even have stopped, you realize, if you said it wasn’t okay. They’d have not gone any farther.

Kurloz comes forward and bends down over Karkat’s shoulder and when you kiss him you feel Karkat squeeze you closer and feel him go all tightened up. He jerks his head to the side—Kurloz moves too, and Karkat misses his chance to slam nugbones.

“…now,” says Kurloz, and shoves Karkat in the back so both of you almost fall. “Go on.” He leers, and you feel Karkat go red even without him seeing the face with his own eyes. “… _you got a pile to warm up._ I’ll see you later, little one. We got a hell of a party to get to. You too, niblet, if you got the guts.” And he flicks Karkat right in the motherfucking horn. Karkat jumps like he’s been zapped and spins around to growl and Kurloz laughs and laughs and turns his back like he ain’t even concerned. Holy shit. You don’t know much about quadrants but he is coming on _strong._ You think for a second about the way he snarls and bares fangs when he’s pitch, and then imagine Karkat snarling back and get a weird squirm in your guts that stops your bulge dead. Shit is weird. Shit is _weird._

So instead you pull Karkat back and up against you and nuzzle up to the horn that just got hit, and all his growling chokes off into a gasp and sigh. He is so fucking precious.

“ _Come on,_ ” you say, and rub little circles on his belly, scritch a little at that spot on his side as makes his legs do their funny little twitch and kick. “ _Come on, best beloved. Let’s talk some shit out._ ”

“You have— _hff¬_ —n-no intention of ‘talking’,” he says, but it’s a weak-ass fight he puts up and he crooks his chin up to let you nuzzle his throat and kiss the tips of his precious ears. “We—we do have to talk—we need to talk…some time…”

“ _We will,_ ” you say, and know it’s true. You’ll talk, in good time. Get some wicked words on and out in the air at each motherfucking other. But for now you let him go just enough to take his hand in yours, and walk off into the hall, the other way from where Kurloz went, on and up toward your block.

\--

You’re laughing at each other and pushing and him growling pretend as you get close to your door, and Karkat’s the first one as puts a hand on your side (can’t reach your shoulder, he’s still so small and for all he’s strong and you know it he seems to get weaker time on time again as you see him) and hisses without words.

You know the brother standing by your door. Know him well.

“…Feeder Travye,” you say, and it’s an echo of the first time. Same words, same man, same place, but he looks so small. He looks so mightily diminished. You bow your head regardless, and he breathes once through his nose and don’t answer. When you straighten up again he’s looking at Karkat, then back to you. Back to Karkat. He looks paused in place, fully motherfucking unsure.

“…bro,” you say to Karkat, and squeeze him a little so’s he knows you still love him. “Go on in?”

He stops just a second, then huffs and goes. Travye watches him as he walks past, and Karkat stops just a moment by him and hisses something you can’t make out. Travye don’t answer, but Karkat doesn’t need, because he goes on in and all so it must be okay.

You hope.

There’s a silence after Karkat goes. Long silence, _awkward as fuck_ silence. You wouldn’t have noticed back on sopor, but you got a better schoolfeeding of times of awkwardness now and fuck if this isn’t motherfucking awkward. You mess with your hands in front of you and wait for him to speak out.

And so he does, in time. Takes a breath, lets it out. “…I fucked up,” he says, open and bold, and if he don’t meet your eyes quite that’s the only sign a brother has he’s not wholly settled in himself with what he’s about to say. You start to say something, but a little voice in your thinkpan as sounds like Karkat tells you stop. Tells you _don’t._ Tells you _let him get out what he wants to say you idiot he’s trying to do something that’s hard for him, goddammit you are so bad at reading the fucking mood, I swear._ You shut your trap. Gotta let a brother talk.

“I let my feelings get on top of me,” Travye goes on, and he’s got his hands behind his back and his head up high like he’s doing a schoolfeeding. “I let myself get…frustrated. And I fucked up. You didn’t do shit to deserve it except…make him happy where I couldn’t.”

The word shake just the tiniest bit. He straightens them out like wrigglers who won’t sit still in schoolfeeding. Clears his squawkblister and breathes again.

“So I owe it to you,” he says, “—to say I fucked up, and I regret that.”

“Aw, brother,” you say, and you don’t even try to keep your voice from shaking back. “No man, s’cool, you don’t gotta—”

“I do.”

He sounds surer than you feel. You nod and shut up like you’re the wriggler who wouldn’t shut up and got bawled out (and so many times on times again you were).

“I also—fucked up my palemate.”

You remember how she looked at you, how she screamed filth and curses on your head and fought to hurt you, and you flinch. He turns his eyes away from it, like it hurts to see you think about her like that.

“You set me straight on that,” he says, “—and I’m grateful for that too. That was wiser than I figured you would be, when I didn’t know you had anything in your pan beside sopor and rot.”

You wince hard, sting of shame and your stupid idiot self in the past shoving poison in his mouth. Travye notices. Blinks.

“…was that too harsh?”

You can’t rightly say it wasn’t, so you nod. He opens his mouth—closes it again.

“…sorry for that too then,” he says, and there’s a note to his voice like there’s a joke—not the “sorry” itself but the way he’s making new reasons to say it even while he works on another one. You smile a little. He smiles back a little, just the quirked corner of his mouth. “I speak too plain, I’ve been told. Judge too harsh and then tell kin so right to their faces.”

“I’m all not judging at all,” you say, a little scared of the words even all coming out your mouth but willing for the way he looks at you a little less tense. Talking to him almost like normal, for all the shit as went down around you. “…and then not telling fuck-all, for reasons of how I’m a cowardly slime-sucking shit-panned dumbass and all—”

“On everybody but yourself, _apparently_ ,” says Travye, all dry, and turns up an eyebrow at you. You feel your fins go warm. Look down at your feet. “You and K—” He stops. Clears his throat again.

“…always judging at yourself too hard,” he says, a little quieter. “You get that…straight down the bloodline.”

You stand there still a second, and it comes back to hive again—how he knows Kurloz, how long and how deep, even if now they’re come apart—he knew him so long ago. You feel small, like you’re nothing.

Then Travye blinks and stands straighter, and you come back to.

“—But what I _meant_ to say,” he says, “—is about my moirail.”

You keep the flinch away this time, for want of not hurting him. He looks nervous again, although a brother holds it close to his thorax for damn sure. It’s barely there to see. But for all as closed-off as Feeder Travye is, your matesprit is moreso and you’re getting better than you figured at reading faces that don’t want read. Doesn’t want to talk to you on this.

“…you’re the one she meant to hurt,” he says, and there’s that saying-too-straight again, blunt and hard. He looks just past you. “So. You’re the one who decides…”

He fades off.

“What?” First you heard about it. You ain’t in charge of discipline here, why would it be on you? “I don’t decide shit-all, do I?”

He stares at you.

“Brother,” he says. “…you hold my palemate’s life in your hands.”

Feels like a punch in the guts. You stare at him. He looks back, and his eyes are old and tired and fucking _scared_.

“I know you have no reason to grant,” he says, like you’re silent for unwillingness to forgive and not because you know now and sudden that he’s afraid you’ll order his moirail—that you’ll have her… “And you have however long as you like to make a choice. But I’d plead for the life of my moirail. That’s what I came here to say.” He holds your eyes one more second as you stare at him, voiceless and locked up inside, and then he turns before you can speak and…he goes.

You open your mouth, reach out toward his back like you’re going to call him back, but you can’t think what you want to say or why, and you just watch him go unheeding of your hand reached out toward him.

When he’s gone, there’s no reason to stand outside the room anymore. You stare after him, then you breathe and turn and go in.

Karkat is cleaning up your block when you come in. He looks up like he’s guilty when you come in, holding some pairs of your pants and an old horn, then gets a good look at your face and drops them in a pile in the corner.

“Gamzee?”

You shake your head, and he opens his mouth and then closes it, presses his lips into a tight little line.

“Okay,” he says. “Alright, not yet. First things first, right?”

You nod this time, and he comes over to you and holds his hands out, not leading you but pulling you all the same. You follow where he takes you, follow his hands until he leads you to kneel down next to the pile.

“Your hair is awful,” he says, and shit, there’s the stuff he always did have before the fight, he starts taking them out and laying them in a line. Kurloz does the same, with his whips and needles and knives, but it’s a different thrill entire when Karkat lays out brush and comb and rags and basin and wound-kit and _fuck_. You’re working hard at remembering why you were mad, like he told at you to, but it’s hard when you keep remembering how much you love him. He’s needed somebody to take care of almost as much as you have, you think. His hair is all fucked up and shagged in the back where he usually remembers to cut it off short to his pan, his claws are ragged and his eyes all shadowed. He is motherfucking neglected.

He reaches out, and then he stops. “…can I take off your paint?”

He ain’t had to ask in so long, the question doesn’t make sense. You open your mouth and a noise comes out, but you just kind of nod instead. Lean forward and raise your face to allow his hands to touch your face.

He reaches out and puts his hand on you, and it holds you and pulls you forward, leans you into his lap. Sprawls you out all broken up on his lap, face turned up and eyes closed and throat bared and god it feels so fucking right like a sacrament. Scripture comes to your thinkpan and out your mouth, flows in bits and pieces—Revelries, forever and always your favorite book.

“ _I’ll sing out with wicked flow to the motherfucking messiahs,_ ” you whisper out, and he makes a little noise and you feel a rag touch your face and shiver at the promise of bare-faced helplessness. “ _I’ll praise and shout, for I am greatly blessed, I’ll cry and weep for I am not fucking worthy—_ ” His cloth is warm with the touch of his fingers, and it runs over your eyes as you shake, traces the scarred skin over the bones of your face and strips them bare. Your next words come out a long, harsh groan, you’re so tired. So fucking grateful. “— _Karkat—_ Karkat, _I feel the claws of gods in my soul, in the shape of me—_ ”

“I know.” He traces your lips with his fingers, not to clean but just to touch, takes a curl of hair between his fingers and tugs a little. You expect in some part of you a groan and a sigh, _stop with the clown bullshit already_ , but he just touches your face and pulls your hair out of your eyes and his touch is gentle. “I know.”

“ _I have colors in my pusher,_ ” you say, and it comes out almost a sob. “ _Raising my hands, spitting delirious beats the like of which a motherfucker never heard, I—worship—_! Fuck, Karkat…”

“There you go. Goddammit, you’re such a mess, when was the last time you took this off?” He’s fussing and touching and holding and clicking his teeth at you like a worried lusus. “—god. Fuck.” He gets up to the roots of your hair, cleans out the paint gently. “Your hair needs cutting.”

You never liked it long. You nod and he runs his fingers through your hair and sighs. He’s warm underneath you.

“Okay,” he says, finally, reluctantly. “Okay, your face is clean. Sit up. Come on, you great heavy idiot, get off. I can’t cut your hair like this.” You make a noise to let him know you don’t enjoy or accept—he tsks at you and flicks a horn. “Gamzee.” And then he leans down and puts a gentle little upside-down kiss on your lips, and fuck, you can’t say no when he does that. He rests his cheek up against yours, for all bending down like that must not be the best for his cartilage column, and his breath is a warm comfort against your ear. “ _…sit up for me._ ”

You sigh and do like you’re told. Karkat reaches down to his things all laid out and picks up all sorts of stuff—hair-taming shit in bottles, combs, scissors.

“Ablutions block,” he says, and gets himself up, slow like an achey old rustblood, groaning as he straightens out his back. “— _hnh_. Now. Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

He’s got bruises all over when he strips off to get in the ablutions trap with you; his skin looks strange, lighter almost. There’s big heavy shadows under his eyes even clearer than normal, and you’re possessed of a mind to kiss them and he flails so much you almost fall over on top of him. But you get in under the water in time, and he’s soaking your hair and fussing over your beat-up fronds and chewed-up lips while you fret the same time at the marks of Kurloz’s claws in his arm. There’s a bite in his lip too, all swelled up, and his hair is longer than he likes it either. He pretends like he’s not listening when you point out, till you take his arms and set him straight to look at you right in the oculars.

“ _Lemme take care of you, brother,_ ” you tell him, half pleading half telling so, and he goes redder and nods his head down. You grab him and pull him really close to you and kiss his hair and kiss his face and pull him so close. “ _You didn’t even take care at yourself while I was gone, best friend—_ best friend… _all acting like you got it all…_ ”

He paps you on the face, real gentle, and lets you put your hands across his back. His skin feels strange to your hands, like you can feel the thud thud thud of his pusher throughout and inside all his small fronds. Maybe you just up and forgot how delicate a brother is.

You could do with some reminding.

Karkat makes you kneel down so you can get his fingers up in your business first, and you get just about melted by the time he’s done rubbing stuff through your hair. His hands are hot, hotter than the water even it feels like, a motherfucker couldn’t even get his guess on of how what a little sun your best friend has got up in him. Sometimes he’ll say real quiet again _sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, seriously, you should be mad at me—you should—_ but you shake your head and don’t let that harsh shit get to you. Ain’t right, he should be so cruel on himself. If anybody should be fucked up at him, should be you, right? And that means if you ain’t mad he can’t be mad. Shouldn’t be mad. Shouldn’t tear himself all to bits about it. You purr at his touch to let him know how good he makes you feel, and he just touches you real slow like you’re made up of glass.

By about the space of time he’s got you cleaned up and rinsed out, he’s got you kneeled down in the bottom of your ablution trap, small as it is and too tight for the two of you, swayed back against him with his arms up around you all that’s keeping you from falling straight down to drown in the water. You don’t even fucking care. Don’t give two motherfucking shits. Karkat’s got you. He’s got you so good.

What rouses you from that—and about all as _could_ rouse you right this second, holy fuck—is Karkat laying you down away from him and picking up the hide scouring bar to start in on himself. You get up all kind of swaying around and shivery, but up you get and take his hands and pull them away from his body. His shoulder’s bleeding, all miracle red in little washed out trickles like how his tears look. When he moves he winces. Startles off away from the pain. Fuck, but you pity him so hard. You missed him so much. He is so fucking tired.

“You’re all sore,” you say, and it comes from your mouth all worried like how you think a lusus would be maybe. He grumbles at you, but don’t deny it. You can see it in how he moves, holds himself—all aches and stiff spots like he’s been beat all over. You almost pick him up, lift him half off where he was kneeling on the bottom of the trap and turn him around with his face to the wall. He starts like _the fuck do you think you’re d—_ but then you press your fingers hard and slow up his spine and he goes _ohhh_ and shivers all over himself.

“Miracle hands, best friend,” you tell him, and curl up close behind him, let him brace up his arms on the trap wall and breathe against it in gasps as you work at the muscles with your eyes shut, feel your way across his back. He loses something the more you touch him, some armor in him, some bit all hard and sharpened up by hurting. He gets smaller and softer and lets himself make noises to your touch. He’s so tired, so goddamn tired and so fucking tense you’re reminded of miracles just that he hasn’t snapped his fangs at anybody yet. You want to tear his tired out of him. The fear and the hurting and the fighting all the time, how tired it makes him—all gone. Fill him up with lights and colors instead, nothing but good things forever. Fix him without making shitty-ass replacements. You don’t want somebody better, you want Karkat, how he is but not hurting, he thinks he’s gotta care at you but he needs caring-for too and he don’t see that and it fucking _scares_ you. You’re scared for him and for how he hates himself without you around. And when you’re not there he just lets himself sit but when he’s not there you flip the fuck out and run like a motherfucking coward and the first friendly frond to touch you you just—you—fuck fuck FUCK—

He makes a noise when he hears you break behind him, and gropes up around for your hands to hold when you grab him and pull him back to you, put your face in his wet hair. The tears ain’t there. Can’t a single motherfucker prove shit. Water on your face and all. That wasn’t a motherfucking sob.

“Gamzee?”

“ _I let him!_ ”

It come out all loud and broken up, and you didn’t know this was what you needed to say but fuck if it don’t feel so goddamn right. Fuck if it don’t hurt in all the good ways. Karkat turns to look up at you, so shrunk for all his hard muscles and bones, so small and soft, and looks through wet hair at your ugly crying face. He looks unright. Unwell. Scared.

“Let who? What? Gamzee, tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Daymare, and—” you choke on the story, on the words, on telling your betrayal. “—let him—before I called, I…he was there and he made it better, he did, I wanted—I was so fucked up, but—I don’t want that with him I don’t motherfucking—brother I motherfucking swear, fuck, I don’t—”

“Gamzee y’r…” he’s slurred, still dizzy from you touching him so. “Gamzee. You’re…not making sense. Fuck, you’re saying alternian words but they don’t mean shit if you don’t give me some context for—”

“The daymare,” you say again, and it comes out more a snarl because he’s not _getting it,_ and you trying so hard to tell him and fucking all— “When you weren’t with me, the daymare brother, the fucking _daymare,_ a motherfucker got his panic on and took to frond-nubs and ran, and who was there but one brother so small and slithering, he—” you lose it for a second, the anger that makes the words come, drop back into the hole so sudden and you’re sad again, sobbing. “—his hands felt so nice, those shitblood motherfuckers were—everywhere all so warm like it was down there in the dark and he was so cold but he wasn’t _you_ but I let him take me and put his hands up in my soul where they didn’t go— _c—colors, chapter…5, 5:42; I fucked up, I fucked up and nobody else was there for fault to pass on, I fucked up, forgive me—_ ”

“Are you quoting _scripture_ at me to apologize?” he sounds like he’s half set to cry his own self, but he also sounds like the other half wants to laugh and that means he ain’t got the FULL MOTHERFUCKING PICTURE of how you FUCKING FAILED. You can’t believe you forgot, forgot how you fucked up and picked somebody else just because he wasn’t there, _forgot—_ “Gamzee—Gamzee! God, holy shit. Breathe, breathe. Okay, that—sucks, that kind of hurts to hear, okay? I’m not going to lie to you about that because that would be dumb, and—we have to be open about shit. Like you just were. Holy fuck.” His hands reach out to you, hold your face and pull you closer. You can’t look at his eyes, so you look at his mouth as it moves, forms words and spits them out into the air.

He snaps his claws in front of your face and you jump and come back to. He’s looking at you with a look you can’t make out the what and why of.

“…thanks for telling me,” he says, and you make a great big noise with no words in it and grab him and hug him so hard he makes wheezy noises in your auricular sponge clot.

When you let him back down his eyes are all watery like yours are, but that might maybe be because you accidentally held him with his face right in the spray, or also because you were squeezing him real hard because you love him. He coughs and whaps at you with the flats of his hot, hard little hands, and you keep your hands on him as much as you can, stroke at his back and hair and try to go for his horns except for he swats your hands when you do.

“…So…” he says after a bit, and kind of looks around for shit to do. “…I was right. He was crushing on you.”

“Fair bit more than crushing,” you say, and put your hand on his shoulder, the place Kurloz’s claws fucked him up. Karkat winces and looks down at the place, then sighs and starts to get up to his feet, shaky. He still groans when he moves, looks all tired as fuck. You get up with him, hands out to catch him if he wavers, and he notices and sighs but it’s with a little half-smile.

“We can talk about this outside,” he says, and steps out, shivering a little bit in the cold. You feel fine, but you ain’t nearly even so warm as he is even at his coldest. You dial the heat up a little while he ain’t looking. “…where did you put my pants?”

That is a motherfucking mystery and a half, for damn sure. You turn and look around your room, but it’s dark and still all messed around, and you haven’t got a motherfucking clue.

“Fine,” says Karkat, hands all thrown up like faithful in sermon. “Fine! We’re going to have to go back in there when I’m done with your hair anyway, what the hell. Sit down. You want it short?”

“Not too short, brother.” Well, if he ain’t gonna get dressed again you don’t see as you should have to. You sit on down still dripping and bare-ass-wriggler naked and he puts his fingers in your hair and kneads around. Your back goes all shivery all up and down it. “ _Mm…_ ‘d look like a wriggler if it’s too short.”

“Short hair is professional as hell,” he says, but he settles in and you hear blades behind you. “…fine, fine. So…snake-troll.”

You sigh and huddle a little—he swats you to sit up straight.

“Brother saw me in fear and knew you and me were…” you can’t find a word. “…so he just tried to work me down off it, that’s all. Didn’t…a motherfucker didn’t really…” Karkat don’t push you as you look for the words, just sits behind you and works. You hear little _schk schk schk_ sound of your hair getting trimmed away. “…he soothed,” you say finally, slow with every word, “…but a motherfucker didn’t ever calm. Not entirely. Wasn’t until I called you I…”

He sighs behind you, real quiet—for a second the hand not cutting just stays on the back of your neck, and you lean into the gentle squeeze of his hand.

“… _I’m not going to lie to you about this_ ,” he says, really quiet, like he’s telling himself as much as he’s telling you. “… _sometimes I think…you’d be better off with him._ ”

You start to jerk around to him so fast he swears and you feel the blades cut your neck. Don’t give a fuck. He looks back at you and you didn’t even fucking notice, he kept so quiet but his eyes are welled up red and wet and shiny. He’s been fighting at himself to not cry and you didn’t even fucking notice.

“No,” you say, hoarse gulp of a word, “—no—best friend, don’t even say that, don’t—”

“He—does care about you,” he says, and it sounds like he’s punishing himself with the words, like they’re all tearing into him the more as he struggles to get them out. “—he understands all your—just a whole shitload of stuff I never—” he claws at his head, messes up his hair, doesn’t look at you. “—and he could be here all the time, he wouldn’t have to go back to a different ship every time he—”

You hit him.

It’s a shitty dumb thing to do, you realize a second after as he yells and goes on over backwards, that was dumb as fuck but you wanted to make him stop saying things like that and words were frozen up in your chest and you couldn’t remember how to move so you hit instead. He’s not hurt, it was barely a slap, but he stares at you from the ground with his cheek all red and his eyes wet and you put your hands on either side of him and make sure he’s lookin’ right at you.

“Sorry,” you say first, and breathe, look down at him. “—shouldn’t—shouldn’t’ve—but don’t you even—don’t try to—motherfucker I _can’t_ —”

You lean down and press your heads together, hot to cold, close your eyes and try not to cry either because of course he’d leave after he heard you say shit like that and what kind of shitstain hits their palemate like that, what the fuck, _what the fuck is wrong with you—_

“Oh,” he says, and sits up to grab you as you start to pull away. “—oh, fuck, listen—it’s not about what you just told me, okay, I’m not—breaking up with you or anything, I just—god, Gamzee, shoosh.”

_(You’d be better off with him)_

_(You don’t add more hot to a burn, brother, you cool it down...)_

“I don’t want him,” you say, all little and miserable, for just this second you’re four again on the beach, crying because dad is leaving again after so long away and so little time back. “Don’t want any other motherfucker. Just you, best friend.”

“And I don’t want you to go,” he says, and takes your face in his hands, runs his thumbs over your fins to make you shiver. “I—really, really don’t. I just thought—”

You kiss him, real soft, shaking-gentle. He shuts up.

“ _If you don’t want me to go,_ ” you say, and it’s a struggle keeping your voice anywhere near steady but you almost do. Keep your eyes on him and try for his sake. “I’ll go to the deepest fucking pit of hell before I leave.”

He goes shuddery-small, shivers in on himself.

“ _Oh my god,_ ” he says, really quiet, and then just as you’re starting to fear a line you didn’t know was there to step over, his face cracks into this little teary grin and he’s back. “Oh—my god. You romantic piece of shit.” And then, still shaky, scrubbing at his eyes, “—if we keep digging this shit up I’m never going to finish with your hair, goddammit.”

“Sacrifices gotta happen sometimes,” you say, and he grabs you by a horn and kisses you again, the scars where your gaze-sockets have got busted and split and healed in little welts. By the time he lets go of you he’s got his eyes dried again and you got yourself all giggly and stupid like you get after you’ve been crying. You flop back on him every time he tries to get you upright to finish up your hair until he’s yelling and swearing, until he gives your ass a sharp pinch and you squawk and go upright so fast you almost hit him with your horns.

“Not cool!”

“You giant wriggler,” he says all fond, and yanks you closer. “Sit still, I’m freezing. The sooner I get this done the sooner I can go get in the nice warm ablutions trap.”

Oh shit, yeah. You’re fine naked in your room, ain’t cold for you, but he’s gotta be freezing his ass off, which would be a shame being as how it’s so fuckin’ cute just like the rest of him. His butt makes you wanna pick him up and squeeze him, kinda like all the rest of him does. His whole self is so small and cute and _Karkat,_ fuck.

“Hold really still,” he says, “—and stop _giggling_ , will you? God. I have to cut around your horns. What are you so excited about?”

“Your butt,” you say, true as true. “—‘s so fuckin’ cute.”

“Fucker.” He taps your horns with the shears, then takes a hold on one to keep you still as he starts in on the hair there. “You’re shameless. And it’s not _cute,_ my ass is like a solar system comprised entirely of suns, it’s so fucking hot.”

“Whatever you say, best friend.”

“It is!”

“Yeah,” you say, and you’re grinning now, poking fun at him. “…’s cool, sure.”

“Gamzee are you implying my ass isn’t sexy as fuck?”

“Wouldn’t know, motherfucker,” you say, chill. “All’s I know is I wanna pap it and then hold you real hard when I see it, being as how it’s just as cute as every fuckin’ inch of you ever was.”

He swats you again, but you can almost hear a motherfucker blushing. “Shameless,” he says again, kinda choked. “You—fuck you.”

“Mm, I love you too best friend.”

He sputters and curses at you the whole time as he cuts through your hair, and when you start in on telling him every bit of him you love and why he starts pinching your horns so you break off gasping for air. By the time he’s done the last clip you’re swaying around and dizzy-happy with the feeling of it, and he’s actually laughing and it’s fucking great. You haven’t heard him laugh in so long.

“We need to wash up,” he says, and you grumble and laugh and hold on to him as he starts to try staggering up. “—mmf—you’re squeezing too hard, quit it! Come _on_. Up. Come on.”

“ _Precious favorite most beautiful little motherfucker,_ ” you coo, and bury your face in the soft little bit of chub that’s still in his belly over top of his muscles while he shrieks and whaps at your head. “ _Sweetest sugar-diamond_ ow—!”

“Sorry!” He’s all apology all at once—you grin and kiss his belly because fuck, ain’t like the sting didn’t fade almost right away, it’s just a little snag from his claws. “hff—Gamzee you giant ludicrous wriggler, where are you even getting this shit from?”

“Right from out my soul,” you say, and don’t mention a word about the oldest, most romantic shitty porn you can dredge off the net, or writing down the names for his romance books the couple times you’ve been in his block and reading them all on your palmhusk before heading to the ‘coon. You know what he likes. And you fucking _love_ giving it, because there wasn’t ever a pet name or a sweet thing said that you didn’t want to say to him the second you saw it. “I wanna do your horns motherfucker, can I do your horns?”

He goes all red. “Not yet!”

“Aw, _when_ though?”

“After I get your hair washed out again, okay? After we’re done there you can—can r-rub my—whoa!”

He’s so fuckin’ light. You pick him up and carry him on off to the ablutions block, and turn the water just a little bit too high for you to see him go all melted in the warm.

He knows you plan to wreck him later, and he does you over real good in advance—lays you out and kneels over you and you breathe the same air together as he runs his hands over your hair and down your neck and across your shoulders, coming back to your horns every time you start to catch up with your breath again and doing wickedness to them until you’re purring so hard air’s hard to get. _God,_ god, fucking hell…

“ _You pitiful wreck,_ ” he whispers to you, and sits up away from you finally—wipes away water before it can ever threaten to sting at your eyes. “Look at you. God.”

“ _Mmhm,_ ” you sort of say, because words are hard right now, and he paps your cheek and then pulls on your shoulder, gets you up and sitting. Your hair feels short-shorn and clean where it tickles the back of your neck, and you feel fresh and remade all over as you start to come back into yourself and breathe deeper again. “Holy—shit. Karkat.”

“Gamzee,” he says back.

“ _Karkat._ ”

“Gamzee?”

“ _Karkat,_ ” you say again, and touch his face, hold it in both hands. You don’t wanna cry again, why the fuck would you cry when you’re _so happy, so FUCKING_ happy— “Karkat, I—can’t—too— _fuck.”_

He looks at you soft, and for just a second you know he’s got the same feeling inside him. How he can’t say in words how he feels, how he can’t find a touch that means enough, how nothing could compare to what’s going on in his pusher.

“…love you too,” he says, and slowly he pushes himself up, reaching down so you can hold on to his hand as you pull yourself up after. “You are regularly so pathetic I feel like I’m at serious risk to rupture my feelings gland and die a thousand painful deaths of the feels, you— _Gamzee._ Fucking clown.”

Well, he went and did better putting words around it than you did. Always did have a way with words. And not like you when you make him feel good he only gets more of them, the words just come and come and he cries sometimes and it’s so cute. SO fucking cute and so good seeing him let it go like that. You can do that for him. You figure that’s the least you should do.

“Now,” you say, and trace one nubby horn down from tip to bottom, down his cheek all motherfuckin’ romantic. “…you got promises to keep.”

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas and you can’t. Words. Thinking. Not—no. _God._

Gamzee is purring in your ear, that you know There’s one big hand around your wrists, keeping you from covering your face, from hitting him when he says embarrassing unbelievable shit—most importantly, keeping you from _touching_ him, from holding him and trying to make him feel as good as he’s doing to you. You tried once before he grabbed your wrists and he clicked and chirred and shook his head, _no best friend you did your job now you’re gonna get your chill on and let me have you, shh…_

He could do whatever he wanted to you.

He always could, when he’s got you like this, when he’s got your muscles turned to water and your thinkpan reduced to a fine golden haze, but it’s more immediate when he’s got your hands pinned down like this. It’s like…what…well, it’s like what _she_ does to you but the feeling is so safe and warm and so…

… _pale._

“ _Figure you like this,_ ” he says, almost teasing, and strokes your cheek with cool fingers. God that’s good, the aches that have been pounding through you for months have faded to weak twinges. “ _Figure you like this a_ lot, _motherfucker._ Would a brother be right in that?”

“ _Nnnnmh,_ ” you say, and turn your face into his hand to kiss one callous-roughened palm. He laughs and eases down to lie next to you. His hand leaves your wrists—you bite your lip and leave them where he put them, and he bumps your foreheads together and smiles.

You’re just starting to doze off, lulled by the sound of his purring and the soft murmur of his voice and the way his hands keep running over your skin in big, slow circles, when somebody pounds on the door.

Gamzee growls softly and huddles down closer to you—the pounding gets louder, more urgent. Somebody outside is yelling _brother Makara!_ So loud you can hear it even through your hazy thinkpan and the soundproofed door. Gamzee growls again but sits up away from you, turning to the door. “ _WHAT?!_ ”

A pause—more hammering. Gamzee kisses your forehead and then throws himself upright and stalks over to the door, shoving it open just far enough to glare out of it. There are a few minutes of hushed conversation—Gamzee starts out growling, responses audible— _what the fuck?_ And _not cool, sister, not cool at motherfucking all—_ and then _–what? Back up._ The conversation sinks to whispers. You lie there and breathe, slowly getting back into your own body—lower your hands, feeling kind of ridiculous for keeping them there even though it seemed perfectly reasonable and like a totally great idea at the time. The thought of somebody else within feet of you, somebody who could see you exposed and weak like this, sobers you up like cold water.

Gamzee nods and heads back into the room, goes right past you and starts digging around feverishly in piles of clothes. You get upright with an effort—oof, the aches are back.

“What’s up?”

He doesn’t answer—he’s pulling on the first slightly neat shirt in the pile, struggling to get it on straight—his horn catches on the collar and there’s a sharp ripping noise.

“Gamzee!”

He wrenches the shirt off and turns back to you. His face is very pale, his eyes are wide and scared. “—it’s brother Travye,” he says, and throws the shirt on the ground, cursing under his breath, tearing through the pile for a good shirt as you start to move too, pan sharpening, dragging on your uniform pants and an undershirt you dropped in your sylladex before you came over. “His moirail, somebody tried to kill his fucking _moirail_ —”

-

When you get there there’s already a flock of interested clowns gathered in a tight knot around the door. You try to push through and somebody elbows you so hard you feel your lip split—Gamzee lets out a great, sharp growl like thunder and the crowd cringes and then parts, letting you through to the doorway. You’re not dressed—you didn’t have another jacket and you didn’t have time to hunt it down, but what the hell, you feel fierce as fuck right now and clean and dry and ready to kick ass, and you know for a fact your undershirts stretch across your chest and around your arms in a really flattering way, okay? Yeah.

…yeah, so you and Gamzee transparently just had a hell of a day together. Sue you. You both deserved it.

Alenne Vetrum is lying down when you come in, apparently unconscious, or something like it—whoever attacked her, she put up a fight. There are gleaming silver gauntlets on her hands, ending in wicked claws that look like they could disembowel you with the slightest flick of her wrist, and the claws of one hand are stained purple. Her short hair is bloody over one ear. There are clowns all over the place with rainbow-dyed strips of cloth around their right arms, looking at her bloody head and fussing around the couch, almost hiding if from view.

The floor is _covered_ in blood. Everyone’s boots are sticky with it. The smell is rich and salty-metallic, and your stomach clenches like a fist. Nobody can bleed that much and still be alive.

…but they did, and now they aren’t. There’s another clown lying on the ground nearby—dead. Pretty decisively dead. Their head makes up most of the splatter. You look back up as the docterrorists pull back and you finally get a better look at the couch’s occupants; Travye is sitting beside his moirail, still breathing like he just ran a mile. He’s got a heavy, bleached club in each hand, they look like…holy shit.

Travye looks up and sees you and Gamzee, and there’s recognition in his eyes. The blood-splattered femur in his right hand vanishes back into his specibus—the gory jawbone club in his other hand stays.

“ _You_ ,” he says, hoarse and rough, and Gamzee takes half a step back. He looks terrified. Can’t keep his eyes off the mangled corpse on the ground. “You. You wouldn’t do this.”

“Never,” says Gamzee, tiny and shaky, “—no, _never._ ”

“No,” says Travye. His eyes are still wide, flickering from face to face around him. Somebody tries to reach out to his moirail—he makes the most fucking _terrifying_ noise, a bursting _snap_ of a growl that makes your whole body prickle with instinctive _DO NOT WANT._ They pull their hand away again, and he subsides, still breathing hard. “No. No not you. You wouldn’t.” His eyes go from Gamzee to you, slicing over you, viciously sharp. He bares all his teeth at you and growls again—Gamzee glances at you and then steps deliberately to one side and blocks you from Travye with one arm, chin lowering, fins flaring.

“Just because your moiral got laid low brother _do not put your eyes to mine._ ”

Travye draws himself up to his full height, and you see his knuckles go silver on the jawbone in his hand—Gamzee tenses and theres’ the smell of ozone, he’s ready to draw his clubs—

“ _…Halore…_ ”

Travye freezes. His moirail is stirring, blinking blearily around her—he scrubs his hands on his pants and reaches out hesitantly to touch her face. There’s a sort of general shuffling around as all the other clowns try to find a place to look that isn’t A) at you and Gamzee looking clean and dazed in your rumpled clothes or B) Travye and his moirail staring into each other’s eyes.

“Al,” says Travye, and she jumps—her eyes keep wandering away. “What happened?”

“I…” she blinks at him, bleary-eyed and dazed. “…it…”

And then she looks past him and sees Gamzee, and her eyes narrow.

“… _Makara,_ ” she says, and you can’t read the way she says the name. Her face is blank and intense. “It was you.”

Gamzee looks petrified. Travye stares at him, confusion and betrayal flickering acros his face in quick succession—Gamzee looks like he might be about to cry, mouthing silent pieces of words that never get finished, choking on them. Vetrum keeps her eyes fixed on him, staring, brow furrowed like she’s trying to remember something but she can’t quite recall.

“What?” Gamzee gets out finally, choking, “—no, I—but—I swear, I never—”

“ _Because of you,_ ” Vetrum mumbles, and starts to sit up, holding her head. “ _—because—what I did._ ”

“Revenge?” Your voice sounds too loud in your own ears. “Why? He wasn’t even the one who got hurt!”

She shakes her head, slumping back down—Travye catches her on one broad shoulder, reeling her in.

“ _…that’s what they said,_ ” she says. “ _…’should’ve kept your claws off the Makara line, bitch._ ”

“Why is _he_ here?” somebody mumbles behind you, and your hackles rise. “… _keep it in-family_ …”

“No you won’t!” you round on the mumbler—at least a sweep younger than you by the paleness of their skin and their too-big clothes, but still almost the same height, fuck—“—because I don’t care how special you think you are, sometimes you have to depend on the rest of the empire for things, instead of keeping everything _in the family_ and missing things because you’re too close to the problem. The Condesce needs to know there’s internal shit going down in the church, okay? It’s _her empire._ You’re _her subjects._ How the fuck is she supposed to take care of her empire if you’re all dragging your feet and refusing to tell her things are happening?!”

There’s silence for a second. The trainee whose space you’re invading looks more than a little bit terrified, and nobody seems to want to go near you—you take a step back and breathe deeply and then regret it as the smell of flesh and blood washes over you again.

“I’m reporting this to her imperious condescension so she can fucking _help_ ,” you say, and pull out your palmhusk. “Does anybody want to fucking _stop me?!_ ”

Silence. And then behind you, very quiet,

“ _…leave ye not the dirtbound warm of blood to crawl and scrape, and waste offerings in vain,_ ” says Travye very quietly. Gamzee glances back at him, and Travye pauses. Gamzee’s mouth quirks into something like a smile.

“— _they owe you penance and awe and what they give you are owed to take_ ,” he continues, almost sing-song. “ _A good ruler does the mercy of taking._ ”

“Book?” Travye snaps out.

“Conviction,” says Gamzee immediately—how the hell he knows all of them off the top of his head you have _no idea,_ how many of the goddamn things do they even have?

“Chapter and verse.”

“34: 18.” Gamzee blinks and then adds, “—uh, motherfuck. Through…22.”

The crowd of clowns murmurs appreciatively. You officially have no idea what’s going on, but you type out your message to the empress anyway. You get a message back almost immediately: _got t)(e idea already but you gonna )(afta tell me the D------E -------ETS._ _report to me before daybreak. T)(is one is all yours, nubbles._

“That said,” you say, half-distracted, and look up, shoving your palmhusk back into your sylladex. “—the investigation is going to be mostly based in the church anyway. It doesn’t even make that much of a difference. But she’s assigned it to me, so I’m going to need to know whatever you come up with. Good?”

You get mostly sullen nods, and you get the feeling you only get those because Gamzee is standing by your shoulder growling softly, but you do get nods. You nod back. “Okay then,” you say, and turn back to Gamzee. You don’t have time to think of what you want to say, but he must understand by the look on your face because he nods and turns back in turn to Travye.

“You got my handle, bro,” he says, and Travye takes a breath through his nose and nods. Gamzee turns back to the others and good god, was he not standing up straight before? You thought he was as tall as he could get, but when he draws himself up he _really_ draws himself up. The rest of the clowns seem to shrink a little in comparison. “Who’s not mission-bound? Step up, motherfuckers.”

A few clowns step forward—mostly young, wrigglers just assigned. Gamzee looks past them at the others, the taller ones with the dark paint.

“Brothers,” he says, and points to two of them with the same sign and strangely similar features. “—“Ravell, Raywar, blessed as fuck and all, got plenty of luck to share.”

They bow their heads like that’s a legitimate reason to pick them. “Should be fun,” says one, and “—could be a laugh,” says the other at the same time. “We can only guard together.” “We sleep and wake together.” “If one is dreaming the other one sure as fuck won’t be paying attention.”

“Motherfuckin’ fair,” says Gamzee, like this in any way makes sense, and turns to another troll, tall and heavyset. “Sister Cisine?”

“For our favorite schoolfeeder?” She draws a pair of maces that look too heavy for you to even lift. “I’ll take days.”

“Nights then,” says one of the two weird matched trolls.

“Done.” Gamzee holds out a hand—they do a handshake that goes way too fast for you to follow and there’s a murmur from the other clowns. You are so fucking lost. “Seeing as how I’m the reason for the batshit fuckery as sure as fuck is coming down right from the messiah-made fucking _sky_ right now,” he says, to the rest of the crowd, and you can hear the weird rise and fall to his voice, the sound of anger bubbling through. “—I’m takin’ this shit on for my own self. Anybody want to _contest?_ ”

Nobody contests. Gamzee slumps a little.

“Good,” he says, and turns back to Travye, who’s watching him with a weird look on his face. “I’m takin’ leave. “ He hesitates a second, then, smaller and quieter, “…sorry, brother. I don’t know what the _fuck_ is going down.”

“I know,” says Travye, with a sort of blunt frankness. “You wouldn’t send somebody else, you’re not clever enough.”

“Harsh,” says Gamzee conversationally as you bristle and open your mouth to yell, and you blink and force yourself to deflate a little. Travye blinks at him and then ducks his head.

“Maybe so,” he says. “Apologies.”

His moirail pats his leg blearily—he glances back to her and smiles.

“Sorted then,” says Gamzee, and starts toward the door. People scatter in front of him. You trail behind and stare at him and feel really really inappropriately turned on in the palest imaginable way. “Go on, clear on out! Let some kin get their rest on in peace!”

You don’t say a word until you’re several corridors away from the chatter of clowns streaming away from Travye’s block, and then you grab Gamzee’s arm and pull him to a halt.

“Okay, what the _fuck_ just happened?”

Gamzee stares at you. “…well you took the one part being as how the waterbitch said you should,” he says, “—and then I figure they’re going after her for reasons of me, so what’s a motherfucker gonna do but…” he waves a hand vaguely in the air.

“You can just—decide you’re in charge?”

“I mean…if somebody real high up wants it more—”

“How high do you rank?”

He blinks. “…high…ish?”

You resist the urge to tear your hair out. “What’s your _rank_?”

“Family don’t need ranks,” he says, and keeps on walking like this is no big deal at all. You jog to keep up. “I mean, a feeder’s in high regard, right, and the real old ones…”

“Where’s the _structure_? If—” you grope around for a name you know. “If _Uderak_ wanted to give you an order, could he?”

Gamzee wrinkles his nose. “He wouldn’t try that shit at me.”

“So…you’re higher than him?”

“Pfff.” Gamzee waves a hand. “Nah.”

“What if two of you couldn’t decide who was more…regarded?”

He considers that. “Dunno,” he says. “Ask the others maybe? Have a slam-off probably. Don’t come up much.”

That’s confounding and infuriating, but there’s no point bitching about it. What it seems to come down to is that if nobody wants to brute-force this case out of Gamzee’s fronds, nobody is going to.

Now what the fuck are you supposed to do next?

“…we need a plan,” you say, and he punches the code into his block door and flops down on the pile he had you lying in no more than half an hour ago, looking pensive. “We need suspects.”

“We know who did it,” he says, quiet. “…we will. Soon as they check against the register.”

“That doesn’t feel right!” you pace past him, chewing on your knuckles—why does everything _ache_? God, it’s so hard to breathe these days, you must be getting sick. “and besides, what if there are more of them out there who want the same thing? If somebody from your family gets killed for you you are _never_ going to forgive yourself, I know that. I know you. Hell, they might not even be genuinely going after her for the reason they said they were! She fucked around with some people who hate the church, they could be trying to tie off loose ends before she gets them caught. We need to weed this shit out.”

Gamzee looks miserable, but he nods anyway. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself, and you both know it. You never had the illusion that the conspiracy was done once you caught Vetrum, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he did, and now he has to think about ti again and he’s miserable. Well, that happens. Miserable shit is part of life. You should know.

…but you’ve been trying, _really_ trying, not to be an ass about this, so you keep your mouth shut until you have words lined up to say what you want to say.

“I don’t want…” you take a breath and let it out again, trying to think of the best way to say this. “…I know…you all have this… _family_ thing going for you. So. It’s not like the rest of us, chewing each other’s throats out to get ahead and not giving a shit. But…she already attacked you. Isn’t there a chance there are other people on this ship who think that makes her fair game?”

Gamzee stares at you for a long, long second, and then, slowly, he bows his head. Takes a long, deep breath.

“… _we don’t take it well,_ ” he says quietly. “Not motherfucking well at all. But—all as onboard who know me well enough to—to try—” he tightens his mouth and looks away. “… _they’d know that’s not what I want.”_

“You can’t know everyone,” you point out. “You didn’t even know that Uder guy had a crush on you, you’re _awful_ at secrets.”

Gamzee goes still.

“… _Uderak,_ ” he says, very quiet.

“Uderak, right. Sorry. Whatever. Listen, the point is—”

“No no.” Gamzee sits up and looks at you, and there’s that look to his face—you can see him thinking through something, see it spell out behind his eyes. “…no, brother listen. I’m shit with secrets, for sure. Okay. But…he ain’t. He knows this stuff, like, he knew we were broke up kind of, he knows secrets all across and throughout, maybe he heard something?”

Your common sense fights with your jealous pump-biscuit. “…he… _could_ …be useful…” you get out finally, even though it sounds kind of strangled, and Gamzee lights up. “It’s…it’s a good idea. I just…”

Gamzee sees the look on his face—his ears pin back a little, and some of the elation goes out of him.

“…right,” he says. “Fuck, right. I…yeah. ‘d be the first time I talked to him since.”

Oh boy. “Well, we don’t have time to ease into it,” you say brusquely, and sit up. “…but first, go fix your paint and shove your clothes back in the wardrobifier. I have to go talk to Kur—to—the Grand Highblood.”

Gamzee blushes. You blush too, a bit late, imagining him imagining you imagining hooking up with his ancestor. Shit. Is this ever _not_ going to be awkward?

“To get— _information,_ okay,” you say, too late and a little too loud, and Gamzee, for all his embarrassment, finds it in himself to snigger like a wriggler. “I just want to see if he has any input! That could be useful! _Stop laughing_!”

\--

You’re not just going for information. You can at least acknowledge that to yourself, now that you’re mature and badass and all that shit. You feel better than you have in a long fucking time, even if you need a haircut still, and you _are_ supposed to check up on him. The empress gave you a checklist and everything, it’s official. And now you have even more reason, with some kind of weird murder-mystery happening around his ship.

You…may or may not practice growling a little bit to yourself while you walk, but that’s—fuck you is what that is. You don’t have to justify practicing a good, menacing growl. You’re a threshecutioner.

You really want to make out with him again.

You don’t knock, but Gamzee must have messaged him because he’s painted up and not doing anything embarrassing when you walk in. Well. Obviously he doesn’t spend all his time when you’re not around doing embarrassing things, but you would bet he doesn’t spend nearly as much time as he should sitting at his paper plateau actually doing his paperwork.

“Vantas,” he says when you come in, and doesn’t look up. Presses a paper flat to a screen and holds it there to scan, then drops it in a pretty impressively huge pile of papers. “Heard you’re the new law on my ship. Ain’t that motherfucking _grand._ ”

“If it involves Gamzee, it involves me,” you say, and then rush on before he can mke that into something gross. “—that’s only part of why I’m here though.”

“Oh?” He turns for real this time, raising his eyebrows at you under his paint. The expression is the most lecherous thing you have ever fucking seen. “Do motherfucking tell.”

“I’m supposed to do daily checks for the empress,” you say, and now, after those spine-searing kisses, after the lazy sharpness that’s come into his eyes when he watches you, you feel free to add, “…I get to suck her bulge if I tell her you’re doing fine, so if you have any complaints keep them to yourself.”

“ _Look at the wriggler playing bucket-slaves with a motherfucking_ goddess, _”_ he growls, and his fangs are so long you know he could tear out your throat.

And you know just as much that he won’t. That’s not how this ends, you bleeding out, he wouldn’t do that and you don’t know why you’re so sure but you are. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes when he glares at you, like he wants to take you apart and put you back together again and own the knowledge of what makes you tick so he’s the only one that can make you.

…or maybe that’s just your bulge talking, because god you really really want him to fall apart. And like hell you’re going to do it by giving him the satisfaction of letting him hurt you.

“Like the thought of her fucking me doesn’t make you sit less fucking comfortable,” you snipe back, and pull out your palmhusk. “…she sent me some stuff to go through this time. Daymares?”

He stays stubbornly silent. Not even a twitch. You tap your tablet. “…I’ll take that as a yes,” you say loftily, “—besides, I knew the answer to that one already, you're not exactly subtle about them.”

“If you know, the _fuck would you ask for_?” he growls, and you resist the urge to smirk and then remember you don’t have to and smirk like a motherfucker.

“Because if you refused to admit it to me I’d know you were afraid I was getting to you,” you say, as casually as you can, and ha, _ha,_ there’s that affronted glare again, the eyes just slightly wide. You took him by surprise. He can’t motherfucking _believe_ this mouthy little heretic wriggler a hurr-durr-durr. HA. “Weird pump-biscuit shit.”

He almost doesn’t answer again. Then he twitches and crosses his arms over his chest as he catches himself. “…goes to too many beats too fast sometimes,” he says, deadpan and flat as a desert. “Still with the shaking too. Control is back and up but the shakes motherfucking _remain_ like a little pissant who ain’t set to know when his betters want him gone.”

“You don’t want me gone,” you say, reckless with the aching throb in your thinkpan and the twitching of your claws, and look up at him and see his hands clenched at his sides and his lips twitching to show his fangs. “…you want to wipe this grin off my face.”

To your surprise, he laughs. One short, sharp bark of a laugh. “Truth! Oh, the wriggler does perceive what a _pain in my ass_ he has got himself to be. What a marvel.”

“Well good luck with that.” You look back at your palmhusk. “—what about—”

“Bet I could.”

You look back up and he’s looking at you like something to take apart and play with, and your horns throb. He leans forward in the seat and you’re walking forward, head down. You can’t look away from him. That’s losing. “…could?”

“Wipe that smug grin off your heathen face.” He looks you up and down, and you barely manage to keep yourself from shuddering or making any stupid, embarrassing noises as he slides a hand down and grinds the heel of his hand between his legs. “…you wouldn’t be half so fuckin’ cocky stuffed full with—”

“Oh no.” You shove into his space, push him back down into his chair—it doesn’t do any good, but he lets himself be shoved. You know he didn’t have to move—he knows you know, and he smirks at you. “No, you are not going to fuck me today. That isn’t on the table.”

“Fine then,” he says, and fuck him, he knows how your body reacts when you watch him slowly slip a hand under his waistband and slide his pants down, he knows you can smell the pheromones in the air, hell, he probably sees your pupils go wide. “ _Make yourself useful._ ”

You shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t, but if there’s one thing you’ve picked up from—from servicing the empress, in the particular way she—in doing what you—

…you’ve realized, is the point, you’ve realized that when you’re sucking somebody’s bulge you have a lot more power than you would have ever thought possible when you were a wriggler, and not just because you could bite down at any point if you weren’t comfortable with the proceedings. (Not with her, not if she puts a gag on you, but if he tries to gag you you’re going to savage his face, so that’s not an issue.) You want to see if you can make him get noisy. If you can make him moan like the empress does. He’s strong and fast and sharp as a fucking _knife_ and power sticks to him like a second skin, but he’s too goddamn proud and it’s un-fucking- _bearable_ , all that stupid arrogance. You want to break it. You want to make him bow to you and beg. You want…

You really want to suck his bulge.

“Like I’ll know when I’m getting something right,” you snipe back, and very pointedly don’t do him the satisfaction of an apprising look at the fucking awful size of his junk as you sink down and casually snatch an embroidered jacket off the arm of his chair to shove under your knees. Her Imperious Condescension has been gracious in not asking you to take hers yet, and hers is still at least a little smaller than his—although all the gold jingling around on hers scares you more than the difference in size any day. (The thought of the cold metal sliding into your nook keeps you awake and moaning some nights but she hasn’t given you permission to touch without her there and you lie and whimper instead, imagining.) “—I don’t know how your quadrants put up with you, from what I’ve seen and heard you’re about as expressive and fulfilling to get off with as one of those godawful highblood musclebeast statues.”

“Got a lot of getting off on musclebeasts under your pretty gold belt then?” He sneers, and you feel your face flood with furious heat. “What are they doin’ for fun down there on homeworld these motherfucking days I DO NOT WISH TO FUCKING CONTEMPLATE. Quit stalling, wriggler, scared ain’t becoming on you.”

He knew the word “scared” would needle you, you know he knew, but you fall for it anyway. If there is one thing you can do it’s suck a bulge and you go at his like it’s a mission and are pleased to feel his hands clench abruptly in your hair, so tight it hurts. You close your eyes, let your throat relax (you have something to fucking PROVE here and you’re not going to prove it by throwing up on him although that would be pretty fucking hilarious) and dig your claws into the insides of his knees until he curses and gets the message. The hands let go of your hair.

You are fucking _great_ at this, or so the empress says and you think—as much as the thought burns at you to consider—she’s probably had enough people do this for her she should know. Unless she’s flattering you, but you think but the little tremors of movement he can’t quite seem to completely stamp out, and by the way he leans his head back and hums long and deep in his throat, he’s enjoying it more than he expected to.

You tug your pants open, angry and shaking, steady yourself with one hand on his thigh and the noise he makes when you touch your own bulge and groan around his is amazing. You curse your size and the size of your mouth—the opening of it is basically not even fucking big enough, being tiny fucking sucks and when are you going to pupate already?—and press forward until your jaw pops and his feet twitch on either side of you like he’s barely keeping his toes from curling.

Time to make a move.

You pull your back, closing your eyes at the obscene noise of his bulge sliding out of your throat, and then in one quick motion while he’s still shuddering from the sudden cold and shock of sensation, you give the tip of his bulge a hard _pinch_ and jam your other hand up his nook.

He _howls_ , this great bellow of a sound that makes your nook _ache_. His head goes snapping back just like yours did when he started teasing your bulge—you don’t know what you’re doing, but you don’t really need to because _hello,_ here’s rippling flesh like living silk around your fronds and he’s hissing curses under his breath and squirming like he knows he should be pulling away but his body wants more instead. You do the trick Her Condescension uses on you, arc your hand so your fingers are inside, your thumb is against the underside of his bulge and when you give a long, slow _twist_ of your wrist the web of your thumb grinds right up against the place the two meet and he—

–well, he backhands you haphazardly in the shoulder, for one thing. But he also makes the most amazing noise, this great full-throated adult mating chirr that makes your insides _throb_ pitch victory. _Yeah,_ your thinkpan slurs victoriously, as your body turns the force of his blow into what’s probably the sloppiest tuck and roll of your life, _yeah, fuck you_ and _your lusus too_.

“ _You little_ FUCKER—” A hand snatches you up, and you realize on the way up you’re laughing, and he’s panting, all blown-wide pupils and disbelieving, affronted fury. “I should _tear you up and deep-freeze the bits in_ OPEN FUCKING SPACE you little HEATHEN—”

You kiss him, and he kisses you back like he means it, which is an experience and a half—his aeration sponges are so much bigger than yours and he likes holding the kiss just a little too long before he pulls away, leaving you gasping and off-balance and then diving back in before you’ve caught your breath. You retaliate by teasing and squirming— _stinging like a hornet,_ you remember dizzily, god only knows where from, and pinch his grubscars (one of them is torn off, there’s a great ugly scar on his side, but skating your claws over it makes him twitch regardless), scrabble at his sides with the rough pads of your feet, pull his hair, pinch his fins until he’s growling too hard to play that game anymore and both of you are struggling for air.

When you slide down and your bulge seeks around the base of his for his nook, he grabs you by the arms and yanks you up again.

“ _Fuck you._ ”

“What,” you choke, and slam your thinkpans together, aching at the wrongness of not having horns to slam into his. “ _Scared what it’ll do to you? I wondered if you—_ hhk— _ever had a bulge like mine, but now I’m guessing you never—_ tookone at all!”

“ _I’ll snap your filthy neck,_ ” he hisses, and you roll your hips up against him and hiss back through all your bared teeth.

“ _No you won’t._ And I’m not taking your freak bulge, pleasure of fucking me first goes to _Meenah_ and no-fucking-body else, so you can troll up, grow some globes and stop pretending my bulge isn’t a hot piece of whatever awful clown heaven I’m about to send you to or you can _get off on your own you fucking COWARD.”_

That’s not how it goes, really though, because when he snarls, grabs you and wrenches you forward into him his nook _ripples_ around you and you can tell by the way he bares his teeth in a smile he’s doing it on purpose but you can’t stop yourself from making those awful, awful noises. High, open, breathless noises, weak, sobbing little _ahhh fuck ah ah ah oh_ fuck—you get it under control but it takes too long, way too long before you bite your lip and go quiet again, rolling up against him.

Your only consolation is the fact that he almost doubles over you, and he’s shaking too, his claws are kneading into your sides so hard it stings, squeezing and releasing and squeezing again. His bulge lashes between you; you grab it clumsily and he bares his teeth so close you feel his breath ruffle your hair.

“ _Not such a big wriggler now,_ ” he breathes, and you can see the muscles of his stomach tense and ripple a split second before you feel it, pan-melting and viciously good. “ _You cry like a grub,_ mutant.”

“ _You’re so_ fucking _cold,_ ” you say, instead of the biting retort you meant to say, and he twitches like he wasn’t expecting it. You listen to yourself blearily—you sound like a goddamn porn star. All throaty and possessive. Wow. Sex is great. “ _I feel like I’m going to burn you and I don’t give a fuck_ I’m gonna—hhh you think—you’re so tough because you’ve _lived so long_ but—can feel you shiver when I’m in you you fucker you’re not so—tough on the insides—!”

And then the tip of his bulge finds your nook and your ability to sound sexy and mature and badass goes right out the window. He tenses and hisses _fuck, warm_ between his teeth, and you thrash as you feel a slick touch across your nook, not going in but achingly close god _god_ _GOD_ _please so empty please—_

For a few awful, shining minutes he’s winning, totally, utterly winning. His hands slide over your skin, doing things that ache and twinge and sting while your hips rock helplessly against his and the pleasure mixes and taints the pain. He’s so goddamn good at doing both at the same time, picking up your pan and shaking it until you can’t even make sense of the two anymore. Pleasure and pain slam you hard from both sides and you just shake in between them for a few minutes, lost, trembling all over.

But you find things out too, fight back—things you’ve gotten from your romantic novels and movies and _fantasies_ make him jerk and lose his rhythm, he almost laughs at some of them but it comes out more like a moan. You think about how he treats Gamzee, something romantic and old-fashioned and cheesy, and you choke “ _I hate you you bigoted perverted_ freak—”into his chest and bite his thoracic strut as he groans at that, so deep in his throat it’s almost inaudible. _“I want to claw my sign into your back you scrawny too-tall fucker, hold you down in the middle of your whole credulous crowd of lackeys and replace your paint with blood and make you_ admit you can fuck up, what the _fuck—_ ”

“Quite a mouth on you,” he says, and it sounds like he meant it to be mocking but instead he sounds breathless and you’re on top of the world. You are master of the goddamn universe. You _always_ wanted to say things like this to somebody, wanted to feel like your books told you you should and god he’s awful. What is happening in your body right now. What the fuck is even going on.

You growl at him with all your teeth and he looks at you like he’s seeing you for the first time with a look on his face you can’t parse out, can't make horns nor tail of. And then all of a sudden he’s grabbing you, all calloused hands and cool, bite-swollen lips, and there’s a snarl in your ear.

“ _MINE,_ ” he says, and your breath catches in your throat at the _presumption_ of it—and the romance of it, oh god, oh _fuck_ so close so _close— “—mine you little fucker you freak piece of shit mine fucking_ mine—!”

He drags at your hair as he comes, bites at your throat so hard you howl in pain even as his nook does something absolutely ungodly-amazing and you dig your claws carelessly into him to pull yourself down against him, grinding and writhing. You’re whimpering, moaning at the over-saturated pan-searing brightness as the _feeling_ of him rips you to shreds. You bite his lips and you’re half-sobbing _you’re awful I hate you I fucking_ hate _you I hate you_ into kisses that taste like blood.

You kind of slump after that, and go a little bit limp. Your thinkpan seems to break for a little while, like a shut-down husktop, leaving you to sort of sway in his lap and pant.

You don’t realize until a few minutes later that he’s petting your back. Breathing hard, hunched forward, blearily stroking the back of your neck and down your spine.

 _“…you vacillating on me_?” you hiss into the air between you between panting breaths, and he jumps and then pulls his hand back quickly, growling. “Yeah, I thought so. I’ll pass it on to Gamzee when I go back to him. I’ve touched him plenty today but he’s not going to complain about a little more.”

His eyes narrow.

“Little fucker,” he says, but it’s a touch less authoritative than it usually is. He’s still short of breath. “—tell Meenah to get you fucked open already. Be more fun to pail you if there was a single hole in you big enough for a brother to really get into.”

Your teeth grind. He’s grinning at you and you want to headbutt him, right there, right in the gut—

Your palmhusk beeps.

You both stare at it for a second, paralyzed—you still sitting on his lap, pants wrenched open and sticky, him with his shirt open and his pants gone, still absently holding onto you—and then the first notes of _My Pump-Biscuit Will Continue_ start to play and you dive for it.

“Yes!” you say into the speaker, and try to sound professional over the sound of Kurloz laughing so hard in the background you think he might be about to pass out. “Ma’am! I meenah—I mean—your—fuck—!”

“Wow,” she says, and you can hear her trying not to laugh. Your face is burning. “Sounds like you’re in Kurloz’s block and I din’t need ta raymind you, huh? Well, I’ll just call there then.”

“Wait—!”

But there’s a click on the other end of the line and then the Grand Highblood is drawling “What can we humble motherfuckers _do_ for your highness?” and you can’t turn around. The empress is laughing. Your life is hell.

“Meenah,” says Kurloz behind you, and you resist the urge to sink to your knees and whimper from humiliation. “You gotta stick your bulge in this wriggler already. Shit’s disgraceful.”

“Shut _up!_ ” you say, but instead of coming out authoritative it comes out a high squawk and he _hasn’t pulled his clothes back on_ and your face is scarlet. “Oh my _god_ I am so sorry—”

“Aw, don’t say sorry at me,” says Kurloz, and you screech with rage and hiss at him with all your teeth bared before you remember you’re being contrite and embarrassed and cover your face with your hands. “You should apologize to her, little fucker. This shit is downright shameful.”

“I _AM_ APOLOGIZING TO HER!”

“Shouting ain’t pro-fuckin’-fessional,” says the Grand Highblood serenely, and fucking _scratches his crotch_ right there in front of the empress and you want to fucking _slaughter_ him. “Settle down. Shouty little wriggler.”

“Oh my FUCKING GOD—!!”

The empress is laughing so hard there are tears in her eyes. You cross your arms and breathe hard through your nose, and when you finally get words out again they are miraculously even and almost kind of calm.

“I also need to know,” you say, as professionally as you know how, “—if you know any reason somebody would attack your schoolfeeder’s moirail. Vetrum.”

Kurloz’s grin dies away.

“…I had a fair mind to do it myself,” he says. “—if family hadn’t gone and interceded at me, fuck knows. You saying that’s who the shout is about? I hadn’t yet got a name before this little fucker came in and riled me up.” He cocks his head toward Meenah. “…I was doin’ my paperwork,” he says, slavishly. “Like a good-ass little drone.”

“Good job, babe,” says the empress vaguely. She’s looking at you. “You said you was on the scene. Whaddya got for us?”

“Not a ton,” you say, and then remember yourself and start to go to attention. “I mean—”

“Skip that part,” she says, and waves a hand. “Get to the part where you tell us somefin good.”

You slump again, and try to surreptitiously pull your pants into some kind of order. “Yes, your condescension. Uh. Vetrum took a hit to the thinkpan, she was out when we got there, but when she woke up she said it was related to…well. What she tried to do to Gamzee.” Your hands curl into claws for a second—you see Kurloz’s lips curl, baring the tips of his fangs. You shake yourself out of it first. “She said they were saying something like…’keep your claws off the Makara line’.”

“The fuck as attacked her?”

“Purple,” you say, and see the uneasy twitch. Yeah, not something he wants to hear. “We…couldn’t interrogate them.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Kurloz growls, “—now ain’t a time for squeamish bullfuckery, wriggler—”

“—because your old flush hookup turned their head into mush!” you shout over him, and he stops and then sighs and slumps back. “Seriously, what the fuck, don’t you even _teach_ CQC around here? You can’t do the fucking _question and cull_ part if you fall through on _capture—_ “

“Halore,” says Kurloz wearily, “—gets his pan set to do shit on a whim, and follows it like a goddamn hunterrorist. If he sees a fucker and decides that second he wants them dead, dead they will fucking be. He’s been working that shit down, but seeing somebody after his moirail… fucker’s been dead terrified of that shit since you accused her.”

“All I know is, we had one lead and he turned everything above their thorax into a splatter halfway up the wall,” you say, a little bitterly.

“Back up,” says Meenah. She’s been quiet for a long time, frowning. “What you say they said?”

“What?”

“The glubber who’s a splatter on the wall,” she says sharply. “What they said to her.”

“Oh. Uh…” you close your eyes, trying to remember exactly. “…’should’ve kept your claws…off the Makara line’.”

“Makara line,” repeats the empress, and looks at Kurloz. “Hey, angler—”

“No,” says Kurloz. “Absolutely fucking _no._ ”

“What?”

“If it’s the line they want,” says Meenah, and you look from her to Kurloz—he’s glowering at the ground, face growing more thunderous by the second. “Those crazy glubbers in the cult of flesh—”

“We _stomped them out,_ ” snaps Kurloz, and slams a hand down on the arm of his chair. “It’s not fucking _them_!”

“What—”

“Nubs,” says Meenah, very quietly but very firm. “…leave.”

You go. You hear yelling as soon as the door shuts—roars and cursing, and over top of it Meenah’s voice says, sharp and terribly clear, _shooosh goddammit, before I clam down there and fuck the ornery outta you—_

You have a lead. You turn your back on their yeling and run for your moirail’s block.

\--

“Cult of…?”

“Flesh,” you say, and there it is again, that twitch of discomfort on his face. A frown. “Does that ring any reverberation domes?”

Gamzee rubs his eyes, careful of his fresh paint, and sighs out long and tired through his nose.

“…Cult of Flesh,” he repeats to himself quietly. “…yeah, brother, I know it. Not…supposed to talk on it. It’s been struck off the empire’s record and all, just…a story the bigger brothers and sisters pass down.”

You lean in a little—his eyes flick up to you and then away again. He looks profoundly uncomfortable. Shit. This feels too familiar, and by the way his eyes keep jumping up to your face and away again he knows it too. But it’s going to be different this time. It is.

“…Gamzee,” you say, and he winces. “…I know…you’re not supposed to talk about this. I fucking get that, okay? But if it might help us catch whoever is doing this I need to know.”

He bites his lip. Looks away.

“…fine,” you say, and force yourself to sit back. “…I have clearance from the empress, maybe I can find it somewhere else. Then you don’t have to tell—”

“Blasphemers.”

You stop in mid-word, staring at him. Gamzee is still not looking at you; his hands knot in his lap. He looks worried and tired and sad.

“… _kin way back hundreds of sweeps ago_ ,” he goes on, so quietly you have to strain to hear. “…they split. Went off from scripture, said the messiahs came in flesh to us and took a troll as lusus. Kurloz says…” he stops, frowning.

“What?”

Gamzee wraps his skinny arms around himself, hunching down. He’s dark-skinned, adult-molted and terrifyingly huge, but just for a second he looks like no more than a wriggler, miserable.

“…they figure…was a Makara,” he says. “…messiahs’ lusus-troll, I mean, they figured it was one of…us.” He touches his thorax, tracing the line of his sign. “All them got so fuckin’ hype when Kurloz came up for power, they pushed for him real hard. But then they went and asked at him he’d raise them up. Like he was some kinda motherfucking— _savior_ or some shit, _he who raised gods._ Brother Immortal, they wanted to call him.” He slumps, pulls his knees up to his thorax and puts his chin down on them. His voice sinks to a blurry mumble. “… _crazy fuckers got the cull instead._ ”

You stare at him for a long few seconds, mouth opening and shutting dumbly. “—they think—you’re some kind of…god…?”

“No,” Gamzee says, like the idea is ridiculous. “Nah brother. Holy blood though, see? Figure we’re god-raisers, motherfucking lusii at the Serpents’ Get themselves, messiahs bless—” he makes a gesture you don’t recognize, ducks his head. “—That they’d gathered up flesh of sacrifice and made bodies for themselves, that shit ain’t new—messiah red and messiah green, life and death, that shit is old as words of scripture, but saying they’d come down on homeworld and been with us and grown like trolls—” he shudders. “…inquisition in our own ranks, brother, purple blood draining out into the stars…all that and Kurloz no more than a sweep at the church head, he…never did like to talk on it.”

“There’s no record of a schism—”

“They’ve _wiped it off the ages,_ ” Gamzee snaps, sudden and sharp, and all of a sudden he’s standing, pacing, “Ghost stories they tell us all ;when we come to the fleet, whipping if you say the name in a schoolfeeding, that shit is _cursed fucking evil_ and it _cannot be back to us._ ”

“Then we need to dig it out and kill it before it spreads,” you say, and stand up with him. God, your head spins when you move, why is your pusher beating so fast? “We need to start now. We had a lead. Let’s take it.” You pull your uniform armor out of your sylladex and shift in your uniform, feel the weight of it settle comforting on your throbbing joints and itching skin. You feel better with it on. More prepared.

“…let’s go talk to Uderak.”


	21. Might As Well Be Talking to a Stone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lots of credit for happenings in this chapter go to Roachpatrol, who is a great sport when it comes to sitting up on skype with me throwing out ideas about (among other things) pupation and cocooning and baby clowns being so used to Karkat being on board they make some amusing assumptions about his role in the cult.

You don’t know where your brother’s room is, but you kick around on the ship net and Karkat types something in that makes it spit back its secrets to you like a broken heretic and there he is down on the low levels, by the engines. Dark, warm. Scalebeasts like the warm, right? You figure that makes sense.

“I’m going in first,” says Karkat as you head down. You grab his hand, pull him up against your side to put an arm down over his shoulders as a big squad of faithful go by the other way. Somebody barkbeast-whistles at you—not the high two notes of a flush whistle but the single low swoop of _hey get a pile._ Your ears get warm. You don’t take your arm away. Karkat looks right ahead and pretends he don’t give a fuck as his face goes pink. “We’re here to ask for his help with something. I mean…” he pauses himself, licks his lips. “…if you want to make up with him, that’s—that wouldn’t be a bad thing. And I want to… _talk_ to him. But that’s the first thing we need to talk about. Business.”

“…sure, brother,” you say, and make a try at not thinking about where you’re going or to who. “You first. Got it.”

“Anyway, I’ve got the override code,” Karkat points out, and comes to a stop. “…here.”

It’s his for fuckin’ sure—recognize the sign on the door, like a snake’s forked tongue. Karkat is moving fast as you stand and look, already punching in codes—walking down here he’s started making harsh noises on every breath, and he coughs but they don’t clear. Wheezy sounds. Panting for air. You’re taking him up to the medicullers after this, and you’ll sit with him the whole time and growl at any single fucker who thinks they can get to him while he’s sick. But for now you don’t figure he’ll be stopped. You hold your peace.

Brother Uderak’s livingblock is a clutter. Between the main block and the door are cages, open-doored. In some of them, slitherbeasts get their nap on. In others, the places they would be. You can’t see in past them, but you can hear music. Hear some wet something slop around in a bottle. Somebody drinking.

“… _Come in if you’re coming in,_ ” says his voice, all harsh and blurry from past the cages. “—‘bout time, I called for more drink ‘bout a _fuckin’ hour_ ago…”

Then you and Karkat step around the wall of cages. Brother Uderak is sprawled out on his sitstub, elixir bottles around him and in his hand, slitherbeasts nuzzling around his face.

His…bare face. Shit. His eyes go wide when you come in, his voice chokes off into quiet.

“Paint your face,” says Karkat, and you are all sorts of surprised to see his eyes turned away, his face just that littlest bit red. You were fair purple to the nugbone your own self, but he’s not faithful and here he is anyway like that. Motherfucker’s precious.

Uderak takes another big drink. Glares up at you all rebellious.

“…I bare my face at who I fucking _like,_ ” he says, and throws back the last of the bottle. His eyes go up to you for a second. “…would’ve been you anyway.” You and Karkat both flinch a little. He don’t seem to notice. Just scowls at his bottle and pulls out another one.

“We’ve got another fucking crime up where the normal trolls live,” says Karkat, and you wince again at all the acid in his voice. “We need to talk.”

“Haven’t been out of my motherfucking block,” Uderak says, and cracks the bottle. He’s not looking at either of you. “…’f I wanted them dead they’d be motherfucking _dead._ ”

“Listen up,” starts Karkat, and you can hear him making a start on the words in his head, how loud they’re gonna get and how fast—you step in in front of him fast.

“Brother,” you say, and he closes his eyes and breathes out long through his nose. “…please. Your help would be a goddamn blessing, I need you t—”

He makes an ugly noise, all growl and laugh. His eyes are all purple around the edges. His snuff-nodes too, and you don’t dare to think on what that means, how swelled-up and wet his eyes. Fuck. You start to step forward, stop yourself, look down at Karkat like he can give you answers—he looks up and puts his hand in yours to give it a hard squeeze.

You look back forward and Uderak is watching you. Karkat start to let go—you hold on to him tighter and wonder what the fuck you’re supposed to do with your motherfucking face. He looks at you unchanging for a second, then he laughs small and unfunny. “Oh,” he says. “ _Now_ you need me.”

Your face heats under your paint, your fins fold a little. “I need you…not for that,” you say, and Karkat looks from you to him and back again, biting at the inside of his mouth to keep himself quieted. He wants to shout, you know he does. He’s getting downright protective at you and you love it but you both know now’s not the time. “I stand by what I…said before.”

“What thing you said?” He curls his self up a little tighter, lowers his voice down all hoarse and teary and you flinch because you know how the voice he puts on rings true as your own. “…’ _help me’_?”

Slap in the face. You hiss at him and your hand comes out of Karkat’s to make a fist, but Uderak’s not watching. He holds out a hand—a slitherbeast on the back of the sitstub lifts its head and goes up his arm, flicks its tongue out up against his cheek like it’s getting a taste on of him. He looks at it and not you, rubs one finger down its back.

“It wasn’t like that,” you say, but it sounds weaker than you meant it, small, harsh. “It wasn’t and you know it, brother.”

“No,” he says, and his voice has gone sharper now. He looks up at you again, lets the slitherbeast off into the dark. Karkat looks with eyes all sharp from you to him. “No, I didn’t motherfucking _know,_ or I wouldn’t have done what I did, would I? Wouldn’t have _humiliated_ myself.”

“You were fuckin’ _drunk_.” You sniff the air—yeah. “—you _are_ drunk.”

“And you were bare-face and bare-back in the middle of the feeding blocks, running from invisible shit and making noises like you were set to fucking _cry_!” He laughs again—false—and raises the drink to his mouth. Karkat’s hands are fists. “Don’t make it out as if I was more a mess than you, brother, or like it didn’t help when I found you, like you didn’t mean it when you asked for me to help—”

“Motherfucker do _not_ play games with me!”

“When—”

“Help me _reach my moirail_ ,” you spit out, and Karkat looks up at you quick and brows down. Worrying. You ignore. “Help me get to Karkat, help me—help—”

“After what he did—”

“You say another GODDAMN WORD prying at my MOTHERFUCKING QUADRANTS—”

“I wasn’t there for him.”

You choke off silent. Uderak’s eyes open, face does something you don’t know and can’t make out a meaning of. Looks almost like pain. Karkat is standing so straight and tall and you don’t want him seen when he’s like this, when he has that look on him you want to wrap him up and take him away because something is hurting him and this time that something’s you.

“I wasn’t there,” says Karkat. “We weren’t—we—I sacrificed my moirail’s happiness to complete my mission. And I’m not fucking _proud_ of doing that, it’s another thing on the pile of things I fucking _hate_ myself for, but you know what? If I hadn’t, the woman who tried to have him killed might still be trying. And next time he wouldn’t get lucky enough for somebody stronger than him to take the brunt of it, he wouldn’t have anybody to protect him, he would be _dead_ by now—”

“Not if I found her first!”

“Like you would accuse someone from your own goddamn church!” Karkat spits back, and you see it lash through Uderak’s eyes—it’s true, you know it both, you’d rather tear a hundred lowbloods apart in the looking-for than think one of your own would seek to have you killed. “You needed somebody to trample all over your weird family, and it sucked ass but I apologized for that and maybe someday I’ll be worth forgiving. But _you_ don’t get to judge me for giving up what we had to _save his goddamn life_!”

Uderak looks jolted. Confused. Unhappy. Wasn’t expecting Karkat to own up, you think, but you knew he could now. After he said sorry at you, there’s something just a touch different about him. He closes his mouth when you’re on a high about messiahs and family—he watches you and smiles a little and doesn’t tear at it. You’re not so much of a judge, but you figure there’s some growing-up going on here. For all he’s still so little you can tuck his precious head up under your chin.

“…and you, brother,” says Uderak, and you jump and look back to him. He’s watching you watch Karkat, painful and poison. “You just fucking _forgive_? Ain’t easy to fuck you up, gentle as your soul is, but he tried pretty hard to manage it.” He bares his teeth on one side, sneering more than growling. For a second, so hot and strong and fucking _frightening_ , you want to punch him. For a second your eyes burn, and not from tears. You can feel the red.

“None of your business what he said or I said or how I came to get back with him,” you say, and it comes out all but motherfucking haughty, a tone borrowed off Kurloz and his kingly pride. “I pupated same as you, brother, you ain’t the only grown-ass fucker in this block—”

“…Gamzee?” Karkat says, quiet and sudden. “Can you go outside for a couple minutes?”

You open your mouth to argue—Karkat turns his head finally and looks at you, and the look in his eyes is sharp and heavy.

“Gamzee. Please.”

You turn and go.

Well, you go as far as the maze of slitherbeast hives. You look back and Uderak is turned around getting another bottle, Karkat is looking at him—you duck down behind a big cage and shuffle yourself into a little ball so not a single fucker can see you. When you kick out a foot, the door thinks it’s you—you hear it slide open, then shut again.

There’s quiet for a bit then. Figure they’re waiting to make sure you went, and you cover your mouth with your hands and breathe real quiet, calm your voodoos down to nothing and let your mind go loose. A slitherbeast comes up next to you—you look down at it and it cocks its head on a side at you and sticks out its little tongue. You hold out a hand, not sure—it flickflicks its tongue at your fingers and then moves forward and coils itself up on your arm. You nod at it. You’d swear it nods back.

“You want to say something to me, well now’s the time to say it,” says Karkat finally, harsh and quiet. “—go on. You keep throwing me those nasty looks, well Gamzee’s not here now, so spit it the _fuck_ out.”

“… _you weren’t there,_ ” Uderak says, quiet, and throws back another one. Now he doesn’t think you can hear him, his voice is so much more shaking and he can’t make clear. All this raw as fuck emotion under it, speaking straight from pusher to mouth. “You weren’t there, in that— _hellhole_ they had him locked up in! _You_ didn’t save him—I lost a fucking eye!” This all like a legislacerator giving evidence, he is so fucking drunk and you shouldn’t be listening and fuck, he did help you out that time and he’s been a good brother and you didn’t give him a shot, shouldn’t you have—

Karkat makes this noise like a growl tryin’ to be a laugh. “Are you saying he _owes you_?”

Uderak doesn’t answer. Karkat hisses between his teeth.

“I don’t _care_ what else you think he owes you,” he says, and you cross your arms up tight and hold on to yourself. “A favor, a secret, his goddamn _life—_ he doesn’t owe you a quadrant! He doesn’t owe you his feelings, his— _love._ That’s like saying he should let you fuck him because you loaned him some paint in a tight spot or some shit, are you even _listening_ to yourself?! It was pretty gutsy of you to go down there, it sucks you got your eye fucked up, but trolls aren’t _machines!_ You don’t put in goods and services and get a quadrant out of it, you little— _fuck_ , you sound like Eridan…”

“I calmed him down, fucker!”

“You helped him through a panic attack while I, as I previously _mentioned,_ numbglobes, was giving him space because I fucked up! And that was good, I am so fucking thankful he didn’t hurt himself and he didn’t hurt anyone else, but if you think you calmed him down you’re lying to yourself! When you left he was still—”

“I went because he _told_ me to _leave him alone_!”

There’s a second’s silence. The way the words cracked, the way he’s breathing, you don’t have to guess. Don’t want to consider. Karkat is quiet for a second. Brother’s little noises all harsh the only sound.

“…listen,” says Karkat, and it’s so gentle, you’d almost think it was pale. You love to hear him speak so. Love it less at this time. You put your head in your knees and put your pan to not crying like a wriggler. He can’t know you’re here. He can’t. You gotta see how it is when you’re not there. What they think not sparing your feelings. “…could you help him? Help balance him out? Take care of him? Yeah. You probably could. But so could other people. And he hasn’t picked any of them. He—he _picked_ me. You can’t _win him from me._ He’s not something you can just…want more than everybody else, and go after, and get.”

“…. _’d find out_ everything,” Uderak says, so small it’s like Karkat’s not even meant to hear him speak. “…dig out every secret and hurt and help him through, I would—I’d…know him so good—”

“You’d keep tabs on people he talks to too, I bet,” says Karkat, and there’s a sound to his voice that hurts. Heavy, sharp. “Make sure anybody who could upset him fucks off? Put observation shit in his block so you’d know the second he had a nightmare? He wouldn’t stop you. Wouldn’t even notice you were doing it.”

“I…” Uderak starts—stops, like he can’t deny it, and you think of the fire in him— _secrets, your secrets brother_ —and what he’d do to get them. “He—if somebody’d been watching—caught that fucked up daymare before he—”

“See, this is what I’m talking about!” Karkat is pacing, up and down, you can hear his angry feet fall. “You hear that and you think—yeah! Good idea, if I watch him all the time I can help him better! If I dissect him for his secrets, I can really know him! He’s not a puzzle, he’s not a fucking— _equation_ , he’s not some helpless grub who needs you to watch him all the time and take care of things for him, he’s— _strong_ and fast and sweet as fuck, too goddamn nice and completely pan-twisted at the same time, he’s cunning as hell when he needs to be and he’s can recite your whole scripture backward and forward and then five seconds later forget the husktop password he wrote five minutes ago on the bottom of his husktop! And he’s—he _picked_ me.”

And now there’s a choke to his voice too, fuck, _fuck_ you want to run out and hold him, make him stop saying shit as hurts the both of them, but you hold on to yourself instead as his voice goes cracked.

“He picked me, do you—do you even fucking get that? Hurting him fucking _killed_ me. I love that— _idiot,_ god I love him too fucking much and they should cull me for it. I’m not going to fucking fight over who wants him more because that doesn’t _matter!_ But fuck you if you think I don’t care about him so you should get to be with him. FUCK. YOU.”

Silence. Not a word.

“…now,” says Karkat. “We’ve got an attempted murder and maybe some kind of bullshit clown conspiracy going on. Gamzee said you were the person to ask about secrets and conspiracies, and since he suggested it I thought maybe he knew something I didn’t and this was going to be okay. But if you make this _not okay_ for him I’m going to chop your horns off and shove them up your nook. Broken pushers happen. You get to choose whether you take that like an adult or sulk and bitch at people like a whiny grub.”

More silence. You pet the slitherbeast curled around your arm, stare right straight ahead and try real hard to keep yourself breathing quiet and steady and motherfucking calm.

“And for god’s sake stop hitting on him, you’re making both of us uncomfortable. Got it?”

Silence.

“ _Do you mother_ fucking _understand?”_

Silence, but he must nod because Karkat sighs. “…good,” he says. “I’m going. If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re not, and you tell anybody about this investigation, I’m going to have to kill you, but I’d rather not do that, so lock up your oozing gab-chamber and don’t drop any funny little _hints._ Ping Gamzee when you make a decision, I’m sure he’ll want to hear that you don’t hate him now.”

Brother remains un-fucking-chatty yet. Karkat growls.

“And for fuck’s sake,” he says, “— _paint your fucking face._ ”

And then you hear his feet start hitting the ground, closer and louder, and you remember you ain’t supposed to be there. You start to get up—slitherbeast slips off your arm as you get your scramble on for the door, but then the footsteps stop and you know you’re fucked.

Karkat don’t say a word, but when you turn around and look at him he’s looking at you with this face you’d figure as really fuckin cute if he wasn’t lookin’ you down with it. Eyes all wide and outrage, mouth gaping open, _oh no you fucking did NOT_ all over his precious fuckin’ face. He’s going red from chin to horns. He looks back real quick over his shoulder, opens his mouth wider, shuts it up again, and then jerks his hand like _follow me_ and walks really fast to the door. You follow, keeping low so you can’t be seen, and Karkat pulls you out behind him before the door can close and drags you off down the hall.

He waits until you’re five doors down before he turns back toward you and opens his gab. “Gamzee, what the _fuck_?”

“You don’t say all as what you mean when I’m there!” you say over him, and he shuts up and looks at you. “You try to ease and soften for me, brother, and I love you for it—god I fuckin’ love you for it, but I gotta know the hard shit sometimes.”

He mouths a second. He’s gasping still, all short of breath—medicullers, for sure—he can’t seem to make up curses that are right for the moment, and you take the time to move up on him and press him back to the wall, bend over him and hold him there.

“ _…and you said the sweetest shit,_ ” you say, quiet and warm as the warm he put behind your chest with his words, his precious motherfuckin’ words. “… _all the kindest things when you weren’t sayin’ them at me, best friend.”_

“Pervert,” he gets out, but that shit’s weak and you’d all but laugh if he didn’t look so fuckin’ sweet. You tweak his horn—he huffs out air and shivers a little. “Get off.”

“Pale for you.”

He sighs, rolls his eyes up, but he can’t help but a twitch of a smile. “…pale for you too. Now stop it, I feel like I’m in a shitty anime.”

“Yeah yeah.” You back up a little to let him stand—and then jerk back forward again as he all but falls without you holding him up, stumbling on forward and almost slamming flat down on his face. “—whoa now!”

You catch his arm, and he leans hard on your grip, like he’s barely standing. You get your other arm around him, let him lean up against your side—he’s breathing harder, harder still, wet noises. “Holy shit—Karkat, you okay?”

“I just…” Karkat says, and sways up against you. His face looks all…weird, you think, looks all silvery-pale and there’s red lines under it where his blood pumps through, like he’s going see-through. His skin’s all sticky when you touch him, like sweat but it comes away on your fingers all thick.

And then his leg just…goes. Bend back the wrong way and crumples out under him. Karkat hits the ground and his side is all wrong, his leg is still twisted and _wrong_ , he’s breathing so small and shallow and oh god. Oh god oh fucking _god_ , what the fuck—?!

You feel for his knee, see where the break is, and it’s…not…there. His skin is all soft and tight and clear and fucking _wrong,_ you can see blood pumping underneath it. His eyes wander. His body jerks and shivers around like a scalebeast hooked.

“… _wh’fuck,_ ” Karkat gasps out, and blinks. You take your hands away, but he’s not screaming like there’s pain. Not fighting your touch, not crying out. He looks down at his legs and breathes so small and choked. “What—?”

You pick him up (he changes under your hands, he moves when you squeeze, he’s so fucking— _soft,_ molded by your grip—) turn your face to where your best hope is at, and run.

\--

Kurloz is in when you get there, you know being as how the Big Top’s doors are open and there are people talkin’ inside. You shove in, past somebody you don’t bother to take a look on at, right up to the throne and don’t have time for a bow. Kurloz is talking to somebody—he looks up and sees you and he looks happy that you’re there for the slightest second, then frowning all confused, then worried, then he’s standing up.

“Gamzee,” he says, over top of all the other noise of people talking, asking what’s up, asking who the fuck just came barging in-you got no time for them and Karkat is trying to say shit at you but his voice is so small and his breath so rough and wet. “What the fuck? What’s all gone down here?”

“I don’t motherfucking know, I don’t—”

“Audience is motherfucking _postponed_!” Kurloz yells over your head, “—do me the solid of _fucking right off_!” Back to you again as everybody hurries on to follow the order, feet rushing past you, looks thrown at Karkat you try to hide him from. “Let me see him. Let me see.”

“—too motherfucking hot,” you say, fast and shaking as he touches and looks Karkat over, big hands but so fucking light. “—his frond all snapped and a motherfucker couldn’t motherfucking even guess at the motherfucking _place_ of it like it wasn’t even there at all and he can’t get a gasp in for shit and—”

“You dumb _fucker_ ,” Kurloz hisses. You choke off, but he’s not talking at you. He grabs Karkat’s face, turns him up toward him and there’s a fury of worry in his face. “You little pan-leaky _freak_. How long you been getting the aches? Not sleeping right, not breathing right, what kind of dumbass doesn’t—”

He stops, takes breaths.

“You should have cocooned _perigees_ ago you stubborn little fuck,” he growls, and pulls you over by his throne. “Put him down. Here.”

“Shouldn’t we take him—”

“No time now.” He moves fast, ignores Karkat’s little growls and starts stripping off his clothes, pulling them away and laying them off on one side. Karkat’s eyes are half-open still but they’re all red, nothing there, like a blind man. You can see his chest move in time with his pusher. You can’t fucking breathe.

As soon as Kurloz lets go Karkat curls up, pulls his legs up and tucks his arms in, all that weird, pale, clear skin all laid out on his side on the ground. His clothes are sticky-wet on the floor—his skin is shiny with something thick and slick and Kurloz catches your wrist and pulls your hand away when you try to reach out.

“ _Karkat,_ ” you get out, all you can recall to say, and he stirs and turns his blind eyes just a little to you.

“… _shhh,_ ” he says, and then he lays his head down and closes his eyes.

Kurloz pulls you back and away, puts a hand on your head—his hand’s all heavy and cool and that’s what does it. Your breath does something ugly. Your eyes burn.

“Hey now,” says Kurloz, and it’s gentle as he ever was after he hurts you, like he’s not sure if words will break you. “Easy now. Just pupation, ain’t a brother or sister alive who didn’t do it.”

“And a _billion more_ who ain’t alive because they did!” your voice cracks high and hoarse—Karkat’s not breathing and you want to keep your eyes on him but looking at him fucks you up inside, makes you feel melted and burning. “Should’ve seen, should’ve _got my know on,_ stupid rot-panned fucking _blind STUPID—_ ”

“No.”

“—even look right in front out my own blind-ass ganderbulbs like the fucking _moron_ I motherfucking _always have been_ , like the shitty-ass moirail, not even paying attention to—”

“ _Gamzee._ ”

It’s a snarl, great and loud and brutal, and you stop and breathe hard, deep, your eyes all burning and wet. You had him there in front of you, had your hands on his naked back not hours ago. Saw the aches in him. How the _fuck_ did you not notice, how could you mark it to your lost familiarity. _I just haven’t touched him in so long_ , like you would forget if his skin had been so soft and strange and his pusher had pounded through all of him like that, like you would fucking _forget—_

“Gamzee!”

It’s not a pap by way of being a full-on motherfucking slap—your thinkpan snaps into white and then clears back out again a little less fucked up. You’re still all shaking all fuckin’ over, but you don’t feel that feeling like you’re gonna throw up or pass out or maybe do both.

“I gotta go out and make some pretty-ass words at the fuckers who were here to talk at me,” says Kurloz, and takes your chin in his hand, turns your face up to him. You can’t look quite right the fuck at him. Your eyes keep turning back to Karkat. He’s hidden now. He’s going away. “Gamzee. Can you just sit real still and get a patient wait on for me? There you go.”

You’re on the grand highblood’s throne, you think, as he helps you down and you sit without thinking about it. Place where a hundred grand highbloods before have sat. Right now it means jack-shit.

You watch Kurloz stride on off to the door, turn and slip through it and hear the hum far off of voices going quiet as he starts to talk.

\--

Karkat’s cocoon turns out red and dark, this weird, blackened husk of a thing that already looks dead. It was too thick by the time Kurloz came back to see in—you looked up at him and saw his face so still and blank, and knew he didn’t know either.

“He’s gonna be okay,” you said, and Kurloz looked at you with those still, dark eyes. “Right?”

“…he’s a fighter,” he said, and that’s all he said. Just looked down at the cocoon and breathed in deep and out slow.

He took you by the frond and led you off, then, and you went and got your fight and struggle on but he held you and murmured to you until you shut up and cooled the fuck down. Said he found some kin he trusted with even your beloved, trusted to guard and to tell him the very second shit happened down there. Said they wouldn’t think of putting a single claw on that cocoon. Pulled you off real slow and took you up, and up another few floors, up and into the silent color and thick air of the chapel, all colors and sugar-sweet air. Every breath is stardust and elixir. You close your eyes, let colored lights play over your face, and breathe.

There’s no noise here, when there ain’t a preacher getting their rowdy on up at pulpit; it’s silent. The floor is sticky under your bared feet, pulling you down holding you to flat and floor. It’s a breathtaking beauty for fucking sure.

“…shit has been truly set the fuck in motion,” says Kurloz, quiet in the chapel dark, and you tip your head back and look up and up at the murals high over you, size of five trolls on top of each other; great figures, threaded off through themselves and each other, like smoke or vast scalebeasts or blood in water. One in red, one in green. There’s a star of high purple splashed between them, where their jaws are spread wide to devour each other. The fine picture is motherfucking strange to you now. Is that you, Kurloz, all your bloodline together? There, that star in the center? Whose hands put that there? Is it to be devoured in the messiahs’ fight endless, or are they singing motherfucking praises to their lusus-troll, what the _fuck_ are you supposed to think of your church now? How deep does this shit go, how many know your sign and lay blasphemous motherfucking _heresy_ on it?

Karkat couldn’t help, wouldn’t be down with that shit at all, but you still want him there.

You sit there silent for a time, and you open your mouth to ask but can’t find the words. Kurloz eases you in, slow as slow, leans you back up against his thorax. It feels good to fool yourself like he’s got this, all-powerful, like a motherfucker couldn’t possibly fear.

“…can’t let this shit throw us off,” he says, finally, after a long, long silent time. You’d almost gotten to dozing off; you jolt a little and sit up. “What’s the time?”

You pull out your palmhusk from your sylladex—the screen is sudden and bright on the eyes. “Uhh…half eleven.”

“Almost noon.” He sighs. “Fucking hell. Well then _you--_ ” he pokes you in the side. “—need to be in the ‘coon. Get yourself some good sleep. I’ll be tryin’ for the same.”

You almost roll over and turn around and ask him _tire me out?_   But _god,_ now he says it you are already so fucking tired. With making up with Karkat and jamming it out so hard and the fucker trying to murder your sister Vetrum and Uderak wanting you and now Karkat going under, all in one goddamn day? Fucking hell.

“ _Fill the night enough full of holy deed and you’ll have no need of sopor to bless you with dreaming,_ ” you say to yourself, and he laughs a little.

“Take that to mean you had a full long night then?”

“Fullest,” you say, and now you’re thinking on it your eyes want to close right then and right there. “… _longest…_ ”

He stands as you yawn long and slow—when you open your eyes he’s holding out a hand, and you take it and let him pull you up to your feet.

“Get a day’s sleep,” he says again. “Nothing like it to clear the thoughtsponge.”

You part ways outside the chapel, silent—you don’t have it in you to put your shoes back on, and you figure neither does he; he walks silent and slow off into the dark, bare-footed, head bowed low as he thinks. You might maybe hear him humming as he fades into the shadows, and then he’s gone and you got nowhere to go but home.

Kin try to talk to you as you walk. Try to ask you what happened, what’s up with your moirail, what’s going on—you’re so tired, you barely get a nod or a wave to them. Only one or two tries beyond that. Maybe it’s clear how few words you got in you today.

Your block feels all cold and empty, now. You sink down by the pile on the floor and huddle to it, and when you bury your face in the cloth and take a breath, you can smell Karkat. You want him, and your hand goes for your palmhusk before all sudden you remember all over again there’s no way to get to him now. You got no way to reach him. He’s gone until he’s back, and not before.

You pull yourself away from the pile, roll into your slime and sink under into the dark.

\--

First thing you do next morning is go up to see Karkat.

Well, first thing is kick some of your shit around the block into order, get a brush through your hair enough to keep it under control sort of, and shower off the slime. You dress up nice, like he’d want you to if he was there. Then you make your posture column straight, put your horns above your head and go up to see your moirail.

The cocoon is just as you remember it; dark, dry, still. There’s no sign of your moirail, no warm to the outside of it, no sound like he’s moving alive on the motherfucking insides. Just the cocoon, all wrapped the motherfuck up in silence on the floor. You give heaviest most strong-felt thanks at the brothers and sisters guarding him through the day—they laugh and tell you it’s not a worry to them. That he makes a good goddamn card table. You almost get mad at that, till you see his face as he went still again and imagine him shooshing you. _If they’re doing you a favor, I don’t give a shit what they do with my cocoon,_ you can almost hear him saying at you. _It’s not like it’s sacred or some shit. It’s not like it can bother me now, can it?! Fuck, get your pan straight._

They let you have a bit alone, then, for all there’s fuck-all to do or say. Might as well be talking to a stone. But you stand and you look at it anyway, for time you can’t measure, just look down at it and wonder if you can see it shift the tiniest bit, like inside he’s getting his grow on.

You don’t know how long you stand there, when you hear the softest sound of a door going _click_ and then the creak of them opening. You don’t look up—you’re watching, just watching hard, and if you look away…well fuck, all that shit could be ruined, right? You don’t know what or why or how, just that you don’t want to break your look-at. Karkat is in there, still. Karkat is in there, sleeping.

The feet come on up. Stop, start again, and stop final next to you. The motherfucker on top of them don’t say a word, just stands until you have to blink your drying ganderbulbs and turn your eyes just a glance to one side to see.

It’s Brother Uderak. Verato.

You look over at him, but when he glances up to meet your eyes you can’t meet back. Turn hasty back to your moirail’s cocoon and look at it, like you’d see a single goddamn thing this soon. You know you won’t. You know. It’s been two fuckin’ days, Kurloz says the fastest he’s seen healthy was weeks, and that a small and weak one. But still you watch.

To your side, in the edge of your sight, Verato gives you a look. Don’t move closer. Just stands next to and looks down at Karkat’s blank shell.

“…sorry,” he says.

“Not your fault,” say you back real quiet. Voice comes out a little mumble. You know he wants to shoosh you. You know he knows you don’t want him to. You hope he doesn’t know how it is you also _do._ Something to calm you, to stop you from worrying while your moirail is…away. Something only he can give you, but he can’t give you and that not-being-able is the very source and spring of you wanting him in the first go-round. Fuck. Fuck but you want Karkat, and it ain’t fair to your brother next to you or to Karkat himself if you take his comfort for a second-hand fix.

“… _I know I fucked this up,_ ” he says finally, real quiet. “… _and…I’ll get it if a brother slaps me up the head for asking, but._ You wanna hug?”

You blink. Your face is wet. “No,” you say, and then “—yeah. No, I—”

He holds his arms around himself uncertain. Looks ahead and not at you.

“…gonna have to pick the one or the other,” he says, a joke and not really a joke, and your try to laugh is just as fucked up. Broken little noise. You don’t want to try to say everything you want to say, so you just reach over and down and pull him to you. You have to kneel for him to hold you right, and he don’t try to rest face to face like you would with Karkat. Doesn’t turn his face to your throat or rub your back or try to pap you and you squeeze him the harder for it and are cowardly-glad you still have him your friend.

\--

You go on the fourth day to get your toil on up on the topmost level of the ship where the walls turn to windows all around and you’re up in stars. You don’t go there much on account as how seeing a miracle too many times you’ll get numbed to it and also how it’s for the younger ones usually. Older you get the more just staying alive and doing missions keeps you fit and ready. But you need to make your body burn and Kurloz is busy doing other shit so it’s on you to do it for yourself. So you get yourself your oldest rags to work out in, and troupe on up to the top deck to see if there’s a space you can steal on the obstacles.

Last time you tried out obstacles you were a wriggler almost, and you still on sopor and all. You figured that shit would be fun. First step you took, a big-ass sheet of metal on a stick came out and hit you so hard right in the face you lost your first wiggler fang. And kinda crushed your face flat. Had a face all painted across it laughing at you and you got so fucked up from the hit you just pointed at it and laughed until you had to get dragged out by the fronds.

Not a prouder recollection. You look up and around as you come in—obstacle runs all round the room, spirals up from floor on one side to corner on the other right up at the top. Some places there’s no walking-surface whatso-fucking-ever, just bars sticking out or ropes hanging. Not that you ever went that far before.

You make a stir when you come in too—there’s new little brothers and sisters lifting heavy shit, sparring, flipping around on the bars made for such, they stop and look over when you come in. You didn’t figure how much bigger you’d got, how much darker your skin, how your scars and hornstuds and hair would maybe make you stand the fuck out. But they all mutter and whisper and look at you all impressed.

One of them runs up to you— “—you here to fight, big brother?” Looks all sorts of motherfucking eager, has a pair of big gauntlets on. “Sister Mirray. You’re brother Makara! ‘S so?”

She is so fuckin’ precious, little sister as she is. But you ain’t here to get in a punch-up, sweet as the thought of the fight is. “Maybe not this time, little sister,” you say, and thump her gentle on the shoulder as you walk past. “Just wanna get my blood going a bit. Try out the run.”

“Can I watch?!”

“Can’t hardly stop where your motherfucking ganderbulbs go, can I?” You shrug and size up the first couple steps—nothing there to see, but you know it’s all going to hell as soon as you take that first motherfucking step. Like a mission, right? Right. You stop and line up for just a second before you run in, but then the picture of Karkat’s cocoon cuts past your eyes and you give up on thinking about shit. Goddammit. God _DAMMIT._

You run.

It’s never quite the same twice, depends on where you step or what the ship says or some shit, but the first thing is still the same and when the metal comes out at where your thorax is now, you spin around it and keep running. It’s easier when you stop thinking, when you don’t look for the picture of Karkat as is always fucking there in your head, it’s easier and doesn’t hurt so bad— you let your eyes go half-focused and far away, and move.

Run, run, spin, duck, dive down and forward, jump back and spin again. Higher and higher, like you’re watching yourself do it. Behind your eyes, Karkat stares up at you with eyes all red and skin slick and soft and then falls still with his mouth not finished forming your name. You run faster and can’t put it behind you. Can’t push it away, like a brand held white-hot up against you, but without pain you could love. Just fucking unbearable, just fucking _there—_

A dive forward and a long roll, and something goes by over your head that would’ve knocked you right off if you were where it was which you weren’t. Few feet later the floor cuts out for the first time, and that shakes your thoughts a little, makes you think about what you’re doing again instead of following blind on the fronds of your instinct; you jump and keep jumping and don’t look at how high up you are. There’s stars outside. You hit solid ground running and hear down below somebody whoop. Turns your eyes down—for a second they’re all there, all watching, looking up at you.

You get powerful fuckin’ spiritual for a second, and then something hits you right in the back of the thinkpan so hard you go right off your feet.

If your horns were a bit longer they’d be stuck in the ground, but you still got enough height for horn that you can twist around and get back up on your feet. Your pusher’s going hard and fast in your throat, and it’s like there’s a fight, like you get to not feel stupid and slow and fucked-up for once. Sopor didn’t ruin you. You got this. You’re dumb but you’re sure as fuck not completely fucking stupid. You _got_ this. Pupation’s no sentence of unfunny damnation. Pupation’s no monster or enemy set to tear up your best beloved. God. _Fuck._

You take a look at the next gap and you run and throw yourself out into air.

For a second, you weigh nothing.

Stars all around.

Air under you.

Then your hands hit rope and slide and catch. Fronds burn a little, your arms ache the hit they took up and down your posture column but shit, you made that jump like a goddamn winner. Your shoulders go burning and complaining when you make them pull you up and swing you around, but you’re skinny and they can fucking deal. You’re almost to the top anyhow. A brother couldn’t rest now. A motherfucker wouldn’t let all them little wrigglers down as are gawping down below.

You turn your eyes forward and let yourself imagine for a flash of a hurting second you see your moirail standing at the end-road, and you swing onto ground again and run like it’s for the salvation of your motherfucking soul.

You reach the end gasping, burning, aching from pushing so hard and fast and changing pace and directions and shit—thinkpan aching, fronds burned from the ropes you caught, and Karkat’s not there at the end, as you never thought he was or would be. Like you never wanted to want. Like nobody but a fucking idiot would ever even start to get a believe on he might.

You slump down on your knees at the top of the room under all the goddamn endless stars and even from up there you can hear the little ones laugh and whoop and honk and shout praises. But you’re too fucking far, too goddam motherfucking far by half, for them to hear you pray, or the way his name cracks your breath into shaking halves when you lift it up and sanctify on it every holy blessing you know. Ain’t a single one of them who sees purple streak markless over the wax of your paint.

It takes you a long minute to pray yourself back down, get your shit back in order, and by the time you stand and come to the edge again they’ve got themselves all worried up, not sure if you’re set up where you are, not sure if they want to come up after you. Cheer rises up again ragged when they see you, and you wave down and get your look-around on.

The way down, when all’s done and said, is found right there, hanging by the platform edge. Long-ass purple ribbon-rope hanging from a ring on the wall, trailing on right down to above the ground. It quits a little far up, so no little off-planet fucker could prove themselves better climbers than obstacle-runners—you could reach it probably, at your height, if you jumped real high. That would be the least funny of cheating bullshittery though. From the top, on the other frond, shit is a goddamn dignity express. You take a handful, pull yourself forward into swinging empty air, and let yourself slide down real slow.

You hit the ground different than you went up. More living, more scoured-out, like you left some bit of you up there in the stars with Karkat-who-wasn’t. It still hurts to think on—hurts deeper than your aching and burning, hurts somewhere and nowhere and everywhere—but it’s not a thing you gotta hide away from now. You hurt. You fear. Here you are.

“Heard there was a sister down here as wanted to get her roughhive on,” you say, and grin.

\--

You find Gamzee up in the top decks by way of a video of him doing the full obstacles in less than five minutes turning up right there on fleet ‘net. You didn’t even get to asking round the first time. You haven’t seen him move so fast and sure in a longer while, and you imagine it’s how he is away from you, on missions, in training, the times you’re apart and doing your own duties. Halfway up he gets clocked real good in the thinkpan—doesn’t even seem to stop him. Staggers to the top, and vanishes from where the camera can spy him out.

You figure you’re gonna stroll right on up there for a visit.

When you get there, Gamzee is laughing like a crazy fool and fighting two wrigglers at the same time. He’s favoring a leg—short little motherfuckers must’ve gotten in a glance-off hit under his guard—but he spins and turns and never has the same blind spot for a second, and it’s a beautiful goddamn thing. He did take to clubwork mighty fuckin’ well. The steps come easy to him. Spinning and pushing hits to either side instead of taking them by the motherfucking horns, light at the feet and heavy-hitting when it counts. Beautiful shit. Fucking beautiful.

When you come in the crowd takes a second to notice you, they’re so motherfucking riled and up in arms. Then one sharp one at the side glances over and sees you and does the most goddamn beautiful double-take as has ever been your pleasure to witness. They nudge a little hatefriend of theirs next to them, who nudges another, who whispers at a third, and as Gamzee keeps fighting, not getting a single notice on of you as you creep in quiet, you grin at them all and hold a finger to your mouth and pull one club.

Gamzee doesn’t notice you till the instant you start bringing your club down and his little wriggler opponents see you coming and dive away, squeaking and yelping. He spins and instead of even taking your hit and turning it away like you thought, he drops like a rock. Keeps his feet under him and drops down so fast and low on one hand your club goes feet over his head. He throws his weight up on the hand he’s used to balance, and slams out with both legs, so fast and sharp as to snap your knee if you didn’t flashstep back and out of his reaching.

Then he lands and springs up like a goddamn rubber ball, and finally realizes who you are. His clubs go back in his sylladex.

“K—!” he starts, and then remembers himself—“—hey! Motherfucker!”

“No need for standing on motherfucking formality or anything,” you say, dry, and cuff him around the head. When you turn back away from him to look at the little wrigglers around you both, they’re gaping at you like you’re behemoths and they’re awed, wide-eyed little scuttle-bugs. “…clear out, grublings. I got words to say at brother Makara here.”

They clear out without a single fuckin’ peep in protest. Gamzee is still bouncing on his feet, he’s so keyed up from the fight; can’t stand still, all wild hair and long horns and sweaty skin. The thought occurs to you of how his sweat tastes when you lick and kiss it off his hipbones. It is not a great help so far as keeping your shit together and in check. You keep on through.

“All good all day and night,” you say, and it brings back old memories of shit you haven’t done in sweeps and sweeps. You still report your business to Meenah these nights, for shit and sure, but it ain’t got a thing in common to reporting to your higher subjugglator at the end of a mission. “Our sister Keepsall is there now, got a couple wrigglers as wouldn’t sit their asses down doing guard on your boy.”

“Our boy,” he says, and there’s a touch of questioning there. You roll your eyes but let yourself smile.

“Sure,” you say. “Our.”

He reaches up and threads his fingers through yours, and you’re just looking down at him, flush with working hard and laughing, stronger and taller than you’d have figured he’d grow by far, face so like yours but gentled and scars of you permanent and sweet in his skin, and just as you want to tell him every goddamn thing you feel for him, just as the feeling for him hits peak…

Hasn’t happened since you were a wriggler. You look at him, and words just…don’t show. Their absence comes lacking to your mouth. You smile and smile down at him, but you can’t for the fucking life of you make a word to tell him how motherfucking sanctified is the need of him, and how beautiful it is to hear him laugh.

“Brother?”

He sounds worried. You focus on his face, and try to think it out.

“Gamzee,” you get to him, finally, and opening your mouth does no good to shift more words, so you just reach out a hand and hold his face with it, frame round his neck and trace your thumb up and down his jaw. He leans up into it, and even without you quite meaning to he’s guided up and up and you’re leaning on down…

“ _Oh, ew!_ ” somebody whispers a little too loud behind you, and Gamzee’s eyes go from far-off and flushed to right-fucking-there and wide. His ears are purple. “ _Oh fuck, are they gonna kiss?_ ”

“WELL NOT FUCKING _NOW!_ ” Gamzee bawls past you, while you stand there and do _not_ turn the fuck around. Behind you, little eight-sweep-old voices gasp, shocked fucking senseless that they, masters of all fucking stealth, got caught peeking. “Fuck _off_ will you?! Do a brother the goddamn solid of _respecting_ his MOTHERFUCKING MOMENT!”

Feet pound off, trailing wriggler-small laughter behind them. Gamzee huffs out and looks back up at you and there’s hopeful sweetness in his eyes.

“…don’t suppose a motherfucker’d…do me the pleasure…?” he says, and jerks his horns back, off toward the room’s middle. “…you got your clubs?”

You still can’t remember words—it won’t last long, you hope and figure, not if it’s like the spells you had when you were young, those were a night at the longest, usually, minutes and hours more like. But you don’t need to speak to fight. You pull your clubs and smile.

It’s a good chance to get a look at his fighting, in the end. You don’t get to see him fight often, being as how he usually does during missions and training when you’re up ruling and doing shit. Last time you saw him was at the party, and that was perigees ago and you were so fuckin’ scared for him you couldn’t think on what you were seeing. Now’s the time to take a look. You stand and nod to each other and then he pulls his clubs and you circle.

He’s still so slow compared to you—lighter-footed with his young age and his lean lacking in height, maybe, but what you lose in moving you make up for in knowing. You got knowing built in your fucking bones. Knowing of what it means when you see the slightest most tiny shift of a stance, how he’ll feint and then go for your weaker hand. He’s playing low to you as they did to him, hoping to get in under your clubs—you go low too, spin one club in front of your face and one down by your thorax, always shifting, watching him through the blur as he looks for your weaknesses and finds them the instant before you close them. Oh, he’s gotten better, he’s good enough to fight the little ones fresh off-planet, but you are so old and he is yet so goddamn new.

It’s over in a second. He goes for a weakness you craft, art as much as painting is art; subtle like you don’t intend it, clear so an eye his level can pick it out and a thinkpan his speed can think itself clever to notice. He goes for it, and you hit one two and three, so fast h can’t follow you in his shock, so sharp it shivers his weapons from right out his fronds. One hand then the other, swat them out and away and get him good right upside the jaw.

His clubs spin off on either side, flung out his numb hands. He goes right off his feet and comes down hard on his back. For a second, you almost come forward and fuss, check and poke and look him over for hurts. But then he’s sitting up on one elbow, moving his jaw side to side to check it, looking up at you. Seeing him there on the floor, bloody-lipped and breathing hard, disarmed and thrown down on his back like he’s waiting for you to follow and pin him down…

“Goddamn shameful,” you say, and it comes out just that touch short on breath, hungry with how bad you want to lay your foot on his thorax and press down until his thoracic struts creak. “…you need a hell of a motherfucking tutor, wiggler.”

“Yeah?” he slurs a little, spits blood—your nook clenches like a goddamn fist. “…nnnee’some…lessons I figure.”

“ _Oh, ew,_ ” says the little wiggler voice again, and you are the goddamn king so this time instead of freezing up you reach down, pull him right up from the floor to off his feet, hold him up against you and kiss him deep and long and slow. He squeaks a little, and then he feels your tongue flick his lips and he’s surrendering, opening up and moaning real soft into your mouth. There’s a chorus of tiny little groans, a couple little shocked hisses, one or two squeaks that are pure delight. You wait until Gamzee’s had enough to turn him breathless and dazey-eyed, and then pull back enough to smile.

“… _Private lessons it is,_ ” you say, and let him down. “…’m a harsh feeder, brat. Fuck up like that again and I’m gonna punish the fuck outta you.”

He licks his lips and nods.

“Get walking,” you say, and shove him on. The little ones scatter out the doorway with running feet, sprinting past into the block again, pretending like they weren’t staring. You turn your head only to the ones who admit as much—the ones bold enough to look at you, you give a wink and put a heavy hand on Gamzee’s shoulder. You get wide eyes and purple ears in return.

You only get halfway back down the ship, stealing touches, spinning him back to slam against the wall for a kiss whenever you hit a patch of empty hallway, before you give up on patience and drag him into an empty feeding chamber. You pull the door shut and tell it to lock—punch in your ID and it seals tight as the mother-grub’s sphincter. Not a single fucker would come through there now. They’re locked out.

Gamzee is on you as soon as you turn away from the door again, mouth on your skin and arms squeezing you dear and you stagger just a little he’s so sudden and hungry. Takes you back against the door, all but climbing up you, one leg wrapped around yours to move against you all the better. The pressing aches so good against your sheathe, but there’s something about it that aches in your pan. You pull back and breathe.

“Why so— _hnf—_ why so motherfucking urgent, little one?” You push and he winces down, bites down on his lip. “So hungry all sudden-like.” Suspicion bites—you take his face and turn it up. “…try to fuck the worry away and you get shitty fucking and no less worries,” you point out at him, and he sighs and knocks his head up against your shoulder.

“Yeah,” he says. “…yeah, but. Can you fuck me anyway? Promise I won’t…” he hangs off quiet on the ends of the words, not sure what he should try at not doing. “…Even so without the worrying and shit, I…you haven’t, not for a while. With all the shit going down, don’t figure I even ever kissed you much past that first day with the miracle-needles and the both of us were so fucked-up-tired…”

He looks so sweet and wanting. You slide your hands slow down his sides to pull him closer, and he grins like a five-sweep-old on twelfth perigee’s eve and lets out this dumb little happy giggle that makes you want to squeeze him. Goddammit.

“You little,” you start, and stop because you can’t think of a word for what he is. So you kiss him instead, slow and hungry. You didn’t get your know on of your own shit. Didn’t realize you were missing him. Fuck if you weren’t though. He’s still lit up from the run he did and his play-fighting afterward, breathing a little hard, pusher pounding.

His mouth on your neck makes sparks ride up and down your skin. He knows full and fucking well how the lean neediness of him gets to you, and he presses the narrow angles of his hips into your hands and makes little noises against your skin until you let yourself lean your head back and roll your bulge into his weight.

“Yeah,” he says, and smiles into your neck. “ _Yeah big brother, there you go_.”

“You know I ain’t some delicate cull-bait,” you say, just the slightest needle to your voice. Gamzee looks up at you and cocks his head off to one side. “ _Sit back and lemme take care of you_ and that shit. I don’t need—”

“I know,” he says, and kisses you again, real gentle, real soft. “—I know, you got you and I got me, but ain’t it also a thing, like…I could take care of you, not because you’re weak or shit? Just because I like seeing you? That’s…could be a thing, right?”

You don’t have to think somebody weak to pity them. You know that. Fuck, you do. You ain’t at your strongest though, and you know it, and you can’t get it from your head that he knows it too. That he sees you as weak and helpless now.

“ _Shhhh,_ ” he mumbles, and runs his hand up under your shirt. “… _’m gonna do shit._ ”

“Don’t shoosh me, wriggler,” you grumble, but you bitched him out for something already today, and you know he didn’t mean it pale. He don’t have that in him. He sees the world so simple, cut so clean. You almost get to wishing sometimes you could unravel what you got for Meenah into one quadrant—but you hate her pitch and vicious and deep in your soul, and you want her the only one to shoosh you both at the same time. Only she can fight you down to calm. Maybe your diamonds are always gonna blend and run. If you were to fuck up a quadrant with pain and then not clean them up and gentle then down, you’d be a real piece of shit for a quadrantmate…

Gamzee bites you on the shoulder. It’s not enough to break through skin, not hardly enough to sting, but when you jump and look down he’s frowning at you all sad. “Kurloz,” he says, and god, he’s pouting. He surely is, in all but face; big, sad eyes and disappointed frown. “Motherfucker, you gone wandering off in your thinkpan.”

“Always philosophizing the night away, me,” you say, and sigh and throw the thought off. “C’mere. You keep on doing what you want, little one, you just keep on.”

What he wants, as transpirance happens, is to sink down and grind on your bulge, and that drags you outta your thoughts for sure. All of a sudden you’re so unconcerned with your quadrant shit as to put it out of mind entirely. You wrap your hands around the tight muscle in his thighs and pull apart slow and hard, dig your claws into the soft insides of them through his pants until they’re spread wide and he’s sprawled up forward against your thorax, mouth slack and eyes far off as he lets his pan go with feeling. His hips still move up against yours—jerks and long, slow rolls that move his whole body, start at his head thrown back and move slow down his posture column to grind him against you. Pull a little harder and you’d feel his joints give, feel him come unjointed like a doll, and the feel of him still struggling to make you feel good and the thought of him breaking and loving it makes you sigh long and low.

“ _…wanna make you yell, somenight,_ ” Gamzee mumbles into your skin, and you blink the fog out of your thinkpan and look down at him again. His eyes are shut, like he’s sleeptalking at you—he breaths hard and heavy between words. “ _Scream, like—_ hhh— _like you feel so good…so good you can’t—_ ahh…”

“Not likely,” you say, blurt it out blunt and sharp on the back of a gasp as he presses the flats of his teeth up to your throat. “Hh. No, little one, not motherfucking likely. We can’t all—be loud little pail-sluts.”

“Yeah,” he allows, and runs his tongue long and slow over your skin to savor the taste of you. You close your mouth on a groan down deep in your thorax. “… _figure I could though. I’d motherfucking_ love _hearing that shit._ ”

And you’d love to make him happy, but that’s not shit you can do. Embarrassing as fuck. There is no way for you to do that. You cannot open your motherfucking mouth on that shit. You just sigh instead and lean your head down to kiss the base of one horn.

“You wanted me to fuck you for real?” You feel his bulge move at that, feel his body jerk. “Better get on that fast then.”

There’s just one place to be when you’re fucking in a feeding room, it’s practically motherfucking tradition. You half-carry him down, lay him out on the desk and run your hands up his body, edge the shirt out of the way to bare the skin to you. When you trace a gillslit on one side, he jerks and twitches. When you drag his clothes off, he sits up and tries to help.

“No.” You swat his hands off real gentle, pull the shirt off and drop it on the document plateau next to him as you pull his pants down his hips, trailing your claws. He throws his arm over his eyes instead, fists the other hand up in his thrown-away shirt and shivers, tense like a bow. “No, I finally got the time and you got the energy and I’m gonna use both up to their motherfucking _fullest._ Legs open. _Wider._ ”

The growl makes him let out this little cry, little shaking breath—he splays himself out and bites down hard on his lip as you work one finger in him, knowing you’re a vicious tease and knowing it ain’t enough for him, not nearly. His heels thump on the wood. You don’t ease up.

You get five minutes work done on him and he’s all but out of his pan, squirming around and panting for air. A second finger still isn’t enough for him, but it’s enough bigger it makes him moan out loud and slam his hand down on the desk, dig his claws at the wood.

 _“Please,_ ” he gasps, when you spread them just a little, just enough to tease at an ache, “—ahh, ah please, fuck, please, j’s…make it hurt, come on, _Kurloz,_ please—oh—! Fffffuck—!”

“Don’t want to,” you say, for all you want to pin down that shaking hand with a knife through the palm, make him really sing out for you. “Not yet. You don’t want it bad enough yet. But you will, little one.” You trace a thumb real slow around the lower edge of his sheath, just so light he can’t hardly feel it, and he shudders. “… _you will._ ”

You torment him there for endless beautiful minutes, and it’s not as good as if pain was making him cry out like this, but the way he squirms helplessly under the pleasure is good too. You refuse to touch yourself, take pleasure in the way your body aches for friction. Gamzee whimpers and arches and pants for air and then all of a sudden as you’re slipping a third finger up in him and spreading them real slow, he makes the sweetest most tiny whimper and just…comes.

You haven’t taken him so far in a long while and it takes you by surprise entirely—you hadn’t figured he would or could, but you haven’t even hurt him yet and he’s shaking and shuddering and tight heaven around your fingers. You crook your fingers and your claws drag hard at his nook and _that_ makes him howl, drags a second, sharper climax out of him so quick on the heels of the first they might be the same happening. One pleasure, one pain. You think that right and beautiful.

He falls back limp when you’re done with him, when you’ve dragged it out as long as you can make it go—he’s heaving for breaths, little whimpers on every breath out, and you ease your fingers out of him and rub his belly with your hand that’s clean.

“And here was me hoping you’d let go without thinking on it,” you say conversational, and he makes a little noise like a question, eyes still shut, thorax still rising and falling hard with breaths. “—You know how fucking funny it would be if you made a mess all on the feeders’ desk?”

“Cleaning up ain’t funny and it’d be me as had to—nhh—d-do it…ahh, ah, fuck…”

“True,” you allow, and pinch the tip of his bulge as it eases back into him, just to make him squeak. “True that. Funny as all fuck it would be though, watching you stagger around on your legs all wobbly and shit. You get so cute after I play with you.”

He huffs out a snort and pulls himself upright really slow, one hand up on his belly and the soft little ache inside it. “Cute enough you don’t wanna get off, I guess?” He asks all sweet, and your nook tightens up. “Gettin’ the feeling with all this motherfucking teasing, like you don’t wanna come tonight.”

You are impressed. That was downright damn near bitchy as a seadweller. But if he thinks he can sass you he’s got another thing coming to him, and you smile at him all fangy and take his face in one hand, dig your claws in on his flesh. “I think if you don’t make the effort,” you say, “—I’mma push you back on down on this desk and we’ll go for real this time. And this time I _won’t_ be going easy on you.”

He colors and folds. You knew he would, he’s so fuckin’ weak to when you make promises like that, but it’s a great thing to watch all that snark fade right outta him and see him sink down on his knees between your thighs instead. He leans in—presses his open mouth up to your bulge through your pants, hot breath and wet through the cloth.

“Better,” you say, and it comes out just a touch choked, soft and hot and satisfied. “ _Better,_ little one, _mmh._ ”

He works you up nice and slow, putting his hands to busy work on what he can’t touch with his mouth, and watching his face as he takes you, sweaty and flushed around the edges, eyes all closed and fluttering dreamy, hair in his eyes, you are struck again with how much you love him.

You grab his horns and rock into him and tell him so, cracking in the middles of words and when you breathe, telling him soft _you’re so good you feel so good and look so fine you’re a blessing I don’t deserve fuck_ fuck _Gamzee…_

He lets you get right to the edge, breathing hard and sweet and wonderful as you work your fingers hard ‘round his horns, and then just as you’re wavering-close he leans in and lets the whole of you down his throat and presses his tongue flat to your pleasure nub and you just…kind of…blank.

You keep your mouth shut, that’s all you’re conscious of really; you keep your mouth shut and he moans around you and _swallows_ and it takes everything you got to remember to pull out a pail and pull away before you can choke him.

“Aw,” he says as you’re slumping down, shivering out the last of the pleasure so sweet and warm. “I was gonna take it, bro, ‘s cool.”

“You ain’t got a big enough acid sac,” you say, a little out of breath yet, and poke him in the belly. He squawks and curls up like a scuttlebug. “A pail takes it better. But it’s something I’d try some other time, you just didn’t ever make known to me you wanted to.”

“Well I didn’t really know entirely till just motherfuckin’ now, did I?” He licks his lips, all slick and purple, and your still-clenching nook jolts and squeezes. Fuck. “I mean I—mmh.”

You’re about to ask what that little noise was, so quiet and pretty, but then he shifts around a little and you recall how he was so careful not to spill out when you got him off, how he’s still holding. Some part of you, tired as you truly motherfucking are, whispers how sweet and precious it’d be to make him keep on holding, watching him squirm around and sit uneasy at the ache in his gut. But there ain’t no point right now, not when you just got off and got no mind to go for another. You pull him over instead, up against you over the pail, close enough you steal another kiss and a smile.

“You know how?”

He does, it transpires. His face as he relaxes is so pretty, and he chirrs down deep in his throat at the satisfaction of it, his eyes flutter up and back and closed. It lasts him a while, all this long slow moving up and down his body, every muscle going tight and loose, hard and then still again. Goddamn beautiful. He always fucking is, and it’s entirely against all that’s fair and right.

“…first time,” you point out as he finally starts to still, half realizing it as you say it, and he pants and swallows and makes questioning noise at you. “Been this fucking long already, and this is the first fucking we done that ended with you and me and a pail. Ain’t that a motherfucking riot? Goddamn.”

He snorts and bumps his nugbone up to your thorax, breathing in little gasps up against your skin, and you ruffle up his hair and let him get his breath back before he answers.

“Not like it’s drone season,” he says, when he’s got himself balanced up again, “—would kinda…almost wanna hand it off to a drone, like.” He nudges at it with a knee—purple purple purple. “…y’dig, motherfucker?”

“I dig,” you say, because you do, you know almost what he means. Sure is a thing you did. Sure is a pail you filled. Haven’t done that in a long time. “Don’t know where we’d get a drone around now though.”

He sighs. “Motherfucking _tragic,_ ” he says, and staggers up on his shaky knees, looking all round. “…where’s my shit at. Oh, wait, ‘s cool. I got it.” He looks back at you and cracks a grin as you get yourself up and clean yourself up, straighten your pants out and stretch. “…Kurloz. Bro. We _totally_ just fucked on a desk.”

“Not yet,” you say, sorrowful, and do up the strings of your pants again as he pulls his back on. “—never fucked you. Frondjobs all round. We only get halfway the credit all up in this shit.”

“What?” He groans. “Motherfucking _hardships,_ big brother.”

“Yeah,” you agree, mock-sorrowful. “Doesn’t count till I strip you off and pin you down and fuck you over it both ways one after the other. What a goddamn _trial._ ”

He groans again, considerable longer and lower this time. “ _Fuck_.”

“Don’t think too hard on the struggles of the future just now,” you say, all wise, and push your hair back and out of your face into some shape of order. “We’ll get through that some other time. You preaching today?”

You can see it on his face that he is, and also that he forgot about it and also that he just wants to lie down and sleep now. Well, that’s chill. You ruffle up his hair.

“Make a deal at you,” you say. “I’ll preach. I got a few verses from the book of Suffering I wanna talk on. But you better be there in the back. Me taking the front doesn’t mean you get to sleep through service.”

“You’re a motherfucking saint,” he groans, and gives you a big, messy kiss. He still has to pull you down and lean up on his toes to reach you. It’s fucking adorable. “Bless.”

“Don’t sweat it.” You start off toward the door—Gamzee follows on behind, trying to sort out his hair. It’s not gonna work—he’s walking funny, his shirt’s ripped at the bottom, his lips all swelled up and there’s still a faint, sweet whiff of sex around him, like fuck trying to straighten up his chirpbeast’s-nest hair is gonna hide anything—but it’s cute as fuck, so you don’t mention it. “Let’s get on it then, wriggler.”

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you figure you’re probably pining or some shit. You go to sit with Karkat for a while every night after that night you climbed up to the sky chasing him. Four days turns to eight. Twelve. Fourteen.

By the day number seventeen, Karkat’s cocoon is a fixture, and so are you. You just get your sit on next to it and work there, just to be there with him; people come up to Kurloz’s throne room not to petition, but to see the cocoon and ask about how it’s going and chat you up. You have a couple good slams, lazy and just for the hell of it. You drink with your family. You sing some hymns. It’s just…where you are, when you’re not doing other shit. You’re up there, with Karkat.

You’re up there in the third week, writing devotions for massacre next night, when the door opens again and a little wriggler sneaks in next to you and sits down. You look down at him, and he looks up at just the same moment and then looks down again real fast when he sees your eyes. He’s got paint just the slightest touch uneven, unpracticed, and short little ears with runty little fins. His teeth are too big for his mouth. You feel a hundred sweeps older than him.

“What’s up, little brother?” you ask, and he jumps like he wasn’t expecting you to ask and glances up again, holding your eyes this time.

“…is feeder Vantas gonna pull it through, big brother?” he says, all respect.

You open your mouth to answer you don’t rightly know, and then stop and blink.

“…feeder…?”

“Vantas,” he says, clear like he ain’t sure you heard the name right. A laugh tries to come outta you—you stomp it. Half a joke is letting it happen straight-faced. “We ain’t seen him all stomping around, haven’t heard a single yell, so…”

“How came you knowing him as ‘feeder Vantas’, bro?” you ask, as serious as you fucking know how, and he blinks at you. “Never had a feed from him, have you?”

“Well, he’s always around, like…and nobody fucks with him, and he’s got real fancy gold for his horns and his ears and shit, and to hear him talking like he does to every high-class kin he can get his shout on at, we figured…” brother looks at you, worried. “…is that not right?”

You let out a sound that you figure could have been a cough if you play it right, not a snort. You straighten up best you can. “…my brother Vantas is gonna do as messiahs see fit,” you say, and that sobers you up to say for fuckin’ sure. “We’ll see how he fares when they see fit too. Can’t give you more’n that.”

“Only I heard he’s got blood like the Messiah Raging,” says your little brother, and you remember bright, brightest red murals, snarling faces painted all red. The church part of you twists up and protests, the other part…wonders. “…and they wouldn’t take him, would they?”

“Let’s not make gods of trolls, wriggler,” you say, and almost trip on the words half of the way through them, because that’s Kurloz’s voice you’re using, his words, his patient-ass quiet. “A motherfucker’d do better not to turn their kin into vessels of glory, especially when said kin is right out of the goddamn picture. Y’dig?”

He purples up, ducks his head. “…sorry.”

“Conviction 15,” you say, half to him, half at yourself. “…Dumb-ass, don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Right, right.” He shuffles his fronds around, looks down at them instead of you. “…but…he’ll be fine, right?”

“Wish I knew, brother,” you say, and itch for a warm hand. “…wish I motherfuckin’ knew."


	22. Things Half-Made, Things Un-Made

Six weeks after li'l Nubs pupates, Kurloz shows up in your block without a warning.

Lucky for him he didn't finterrupt you in the middle of anything searious, but it's after a long day of rulin' shit and you so wound up you almost skewer him when he shows up silent behind you and clears his throat at you. You pull your culling fork and he knocks them back with his clubs, and you're just going for the second shot (bulge shot, works way more than you'd figure) when you see his big dark eyes and stripes and all the hair and drop the fork back in your shelladex.

"Kurlz, whaddafuck."

He steps up in your space instead of answering, leans down and takes a big handful of your hair to shove his tongue in your mouth. You're surprised, for all of a second--not like him to push and take the first move like that--but you got no cute little general to order into your block these nights and it's been too long since you wrecked somebody. You take his throat in one hand and shove him back and down, and he don't let you go all the way to his knees but now he's at a height weir you can _reely_ go on the attack.

You lose a good long time just makoin' out like that--once his hand tries to close on you, dig his claws in like you're his little pain-slut cutie-pie, and you bite him good and hard to remind him what the fuck he thinks he's doin'. Push him back, and back some more, that almost-dance you get sometimes in a reel good pitch makeout where you push and fight and breathe together. But you know your block better than he does, and he gotta focus to deal with your strayngth, and he don't see it coming when you back him up until his knees his the pailing platform and fold up under him.

He goes down with a yelp half his age, and you come down on top of him and make sure to put a knee in his gut so he don't have the breath to think about fighting back. He ain't on top of his game, you gotta note; he's fighting you, but it's hardly a fight. A step too slow, a push too weak.

You'll weed out the problem. Shoaldn't be hard.

"Okay bayb," you say, and lean back so your ass presses down reel nice on his bulge where it's starting out. "Hands up."

He hates your orders. You take his wrists in your hands as he starts to bitch at you and slam them up there so hard he grunts sharp in pain. You got your platform tricked the fuck out--it snaps out metal and leather and his fronds get reeled up to the tying posts at the corners of the platform.

"That's an _imp-eel-ial order,_ " you say, right in his face. "When I say jump, angler, you say--"

" _Who on_?" he finishes, more growl than speech, and you kiss him again, all tongue and teeth.

" _Good buoy._ "

It's a wrestling match to get his legs where you want them, after all your smooth talking--he fights and kicks and you don't get him to do what you want until you kick up toward him and grind your heel into his nook. The shock makes him gasp--you grab his foot and yank it down and the straps slam out and reel his leg in. After that, the other one's a piece of cake and when the last buckle tightens up you're left sitting on his legs, both of you breathing hard, with him all spread out for you like a pretty picture.

One last finishing touch. You pull out a piece of cloth, scoot up away from his bulge--and get a pretty little moan for it he almost manages to hide--and lean in toward his face.

"Sit still."

"Meenah," he growls, and then you shut him up by cleaning a great swipe of silver paint away from his snarling lips. He sputter and spits. "Fuck you! Leave it be!"

"No."

"The fuck not?!"

" _Because,_ " you hiss, and it's sudden and sweet and low with satisfaction, the way he squirms and struggles when you run the rag over his skin.

"Fuck--you--"

"I wanna _humiliate_ you, sugarnook," you coo, sickly sweet, and hold his chin in one hand with a grip like iron as he tries to tug free, weaker and weaker every time he struggles. "I wanna take a hundred pictures of you as you come with your face all naked, and paper your ship with ‘em, bayb. _I wanna sit you on my lap at one of my parties again and fuck your nook in front of every dense fucker who sinks they're better than me at riguring out who's_ mine _._ "

You take his face in your hands and kiss him hungry and deep. He tries to bite, pathetic and beached and gasping for control he needs like a fish needs water, but you just shoosh him. He groans and fights your hold, but you can feel the pitch in him softening out to tarnished pale the longer you kiss and shoosh and pap, and you remember how tall and thin and scared shitless he was when you met him the first time. Oh, he was so coddamn praycious. He bowed to you, way too formal, but he got one of those spells just then where he couldn't say words, where they choked off in his throat. He used to clam up, sometimes. You wonder if that still happens to him now, if there's times words just plain swim outta his net and he can't pull in a single one.

He was so young. Even then, you were so old.

" _You still got so little time behind you,_ " you say, not really thinkin' about it, and he stops in the middle of a snarl and looks at you kinda differently all of a sodden. His face does something you'd read as...worry. But he's angry too, still jumped up on pitch, and he's scared, because there ain't a single troll in the galaxy who wouldn't be a little scared tied down by their kismefish, espeshelly when it's a bad beach like you. And he's embarrassed, alwaves when he's got his paint off. So much all in one look.

"You're getting blind in your age," he says, but for a dig it comes out reel affectionate. His eyes are softer. "...I'm old as globes, Meenah."

"No." You kiss him again, and it's deeper than pale should be and shallower than pitch, in a middle between them that's almost flush--but there's a nip to the kiss and a hand on his hair and you don't feel him pulling back. His horns are so scarred and cold and old, but when you rub right at the skull around them he still groans and goes limp for you. He knows there's no point to fighting. Right now you'd figure he doesn't even wanna fight you anywave. "You're just barely hatched still, Kurlz. You so young sometimes I can't fuckin' sand it."

He makes the tiniest sound at that, just the hint of a groan he's too proud to let out. He's so coddamn prowd and it's always pissed you off to think about so you bite his lip a little and slide a hand up his shirt between you, pull his shirt up far enough you can touch his li'l fucked up gills.

" _Pick a quadrant_ you old bitch," he grumbles, and you shoosh him and trace your claw under the line of one gillflap. He chokes.

"Don't wanna," you say. "Don't hafta, you can't fuckin' make me, because in case you ain't neticed, you tied to a godclam platform."

His face stays still as a rock and blank when you peel your shirt off, but you feel his hips twitch under you and you take your time stretching and groaning at how good it feels and rubbing at your own spheres like he wishes he glubbin' well could.

"Gonna fuck you today," you tell him, gentle and pale as you know how, and grind your weight down on him to watch his eyes close a little and his throat work. You keep moving against him and keep your voice low. " _Gonna get you to come a couple times and then get at your nook and fill you up and you better bereef I ain't gonna be done witchu till you're makin' sweet noise for me."_

He don't bother to tell you he can't be broken--doesn't even snarl. Just tilts his head back. You ain't even shore if he's showing off pale trust or slighting you pitch, and maybe he doesn't know either. Either way, it seems to you you got no better option than to lean down and sink your fangs right into his neck.

Not all the way--not enough to bleed too hard, but hard enough he hisses curses through his teeth at you. Hard enough he'll have a dark bruise right across his neck where everybody's gonna know he bared it for somebody. You got yourshellf dripping just playing with him, and you don't sea a point wasting any more time not getting something in you, but the noises he makes are so sweet and you keep your mouth on his neck, move across the skin sucking and biting as you slide your pants off and then his, a lot slower. By the time you pull away back to kneel over his bulge, his throat is bruises all over, blue and black and purple, and you pinch a thoracic nub just to make him grunt before you shimmy your hips on down and start settling in on his bulge.

You ain't as tight as his flushed buoy, but you can do ship with your nook like nobody else in the galaxsea, and he's panting in tight little breaths through his gritted teeth by the time you take him all the wave. You pet his thorax like you're comforting him, and then just as the tense shuddering in his arms starts to ease up, take both his thoracic nubs and pinch and twist them hard. He makes a snarling choke of a noise and arches up against the ropes on his fronds--you don't ease up. It's gotta hurt, he's done it to you enough times and you know it does, but you know he can fuckin' take it. And he hates you for it, enough the sting of it just makes his bulge lash in you.

"You scared aboat the cult," you say.

His eyes snap open. There's a kind of betrayal in the way he looks at you--but hell, is there a boater time to question him than when he's tied down and nub-deep in your nook? Torture and interrogation work all kinda waves, after all. Some sweeter than others. You clench down hard on him and he hisses through his teeth and snaps his head back, all purple with his fins fluttering.

"You scared, aintcha?"

" _Don't,_ " he says, sharp and quiet. "Meenah I'm fuckin' serious--"

"You gonna tell me I'm wrong?"

He snaps his bulge in you, hard enough it's gotta sting for him as much as for you--passive-aggraysive li'l shit--and you're older but he's a fuckton bigger and that shit does fuckin' _hurt._ You pap his left cheek and then slap the other one hard, hard enough his breath catches in his thorax and cracks into a growl. He's still missing that one fang, under the scar on his lip where it got slammed out his skull so long ago, but the one long fang he's still got gashes at his lip and paints the corner of his mouth purple. He grits up his teeth and snarls at you, eyes all dark and fins flared out wide in a threat, and you want to shoosh him till he can't move and then fuck him till he whimpers, bite him till he growls and then tease all his worries out of his snarling.

"You're so pretty strung out like this," you tease, and he's a sucker for sweetness just like his little desandant. His ears go all purple. "Can't cover up, can't play your games, can't lie to me...whale, not without getting' punfished, anyway."

He opens his mouth to yell at you and you pull up and bear back down on his bulge to choke him off before the words can come out. Your little nubby sweetheart is outta the picture and you ain't had a good fuck for weeks--you give up on talking for a whale, and ride his bulge hard and mean. It takes a long time for you to make him come, with him worrying like he is--but god, he's glubbin' gorgeous when he does. All warm-cool slurry and fluttering ganderflaps and slack lips you want to spread out around your bulge. Don't take you long after, not with the way he squirms under you, too sandsitive and helpless and struggling to keep his mouth shut. You watch him moan through lips pressed shut and watch his little gillflaps spread and flutter and it's the feel of all that tight muscle twisting and shuddering under you, the look of his scarred face twisted up as you tame him, that's what gets you.

You don't bother to come finside yourshellf--you moan like a pornstar and he growls in disgust and humiliation as you paint his thorax fuschia. " _Bitch,_ " he groans as you ease off his bulge, and then you reach out and grab it before it can slide back away and he slams his head back and spits out some really choice curses you ain't well-versed enough in clown shit to undersand. "--bitch you _bitch_ you crazy _fucker_ \--hhh--! Get off!"

You twist his bulge gently between your fingers, as you think that over, winding it around the unforgiving chill of your rings. His bulge has been out and around over the sweeps, you know. He'd rather do the filling, which you can dig, like how you like to sit over your beaches and take their bulges and play a little with ‘em. But it's been a spare and precious time in between that he's even touched his own goddamn nook and you know--like his buoy does by now, you figure--his nook is the easier target. But it's not hard to get to his bulge too. You just gotta get _creraytive._ If it ain't sensitive, you _make_ it sensitive, and hell if it ain't sensitive right now. Cod, look at him squirm. It is _good_ to be empress.

"...don't wanna," you say, when you fin-ally figured it out what you're doing next. "I ain't done coming yet, or watchin' you do that pretty thing where you close your mouth up reel tight and still can't stay quiet. And you're gonna want to go again too in a little bit here. But before you get to, you're gonna tell me how you feel about this church bullship you got goin' on because I got no use for a Grand Highblood that lies to the both of us any more than I need a li'l pailslut who won't do as he's _told_."

You give him a hard squeeze at that word, and he closes his mouth hard and still can't hold a sharp, wanting groan. It's not a real scream--the times have been few and far between when you've gotten him to _really_ scream, you could count them on one hand--two fingers of one hand, to be really precise--but it's _reely_ satisfying.

You keep coaxing and pushing the whole time you touch his bulge, whispering to him--he comes again, groaning--you give him no fuckin' mersea and don't let his bulge outta your hands and by the time you have him coming again you can see him starting to reely honestly break down. He's fragile now. The pleasure and the anger and the fear all getting at him.

Time to drag him under.

You slide down away from his bulge and he sucks in air and trembles all over when you let the first spare inch of your bulge tease his nook. He tenses up, waiting--but you don't move. You just wait, and tease and watch his face as he realizes you got no intention of moving until you get what you want.

" _Please,_ " he spits at you, and it's pitch as all fuck but the pitch isn't all you need from him now. You pet his cheek and grin.

"Try again."

He knows what you want from him, and you know it's exactly what he doesn't ever want to give you. He fights over the words, grits his teeth and won't look at you.

"Just aboat broke you last time, didn't they?" You push, and he closes his eyes. "And now you got Clamzee. Your little loverbuoy, wants to think nofin but the best of you, he won't wanna hear ‘ _this is what we gotta do, hurt a few for the many'_ \--"

"STOP."

You stop. You said what you needed to, anyhow--what he needed to hear, what he's thinking and you both know it. He breathes hard and slow like you been torturing him, like he's got to catch his breath. You get your claws in his thighs and press them apart as far as they'll go with the ropes around his ankles--he makes a shuddering noise as you start to get inside him, easing him open around you. His nook is tight, cool heaven. You want to fuck him until the only thing hurting him is your claws, until he forgets how to be scared. You need him at his best. Gotta have him at his strongest.

" _Go on,_ " you say, reel quiet, and when you lean to one side and put a kiss in the soft inside of his knee he bites down on his lip and doesn't breathe. " _Say it._ "

"I'm-- _scared,_ " he grits out, hating you every word, hating himshellf more, and you stretch yourself up over his laid out body to pet his face and through the roots of his hair and his eyes aren't wet but his voice just crack on the words. "--I can't be fucking-- _having_ this again Meenah I can't--"

You remember him coming in ragin' and terrified the first time these glubbers got to him for reel; blood in his own color all over his hands, eyes all wide and paint smeared around. _My own fuckin' family with my own two MOTHERFUCKIN' FRONDS and hurting them I fuckin' LOVED IT I wanted more I WANTED MORE--_

That day was the first time your twisted-up eelings for him swung full-on pale, the day you found out aboat his freaky pain shit. He's so young now but he was younger back then, and you took him to fuckin' _pieces,_ hands on his horns and on his fins and on his pretty, bare face. You talked it out with him, and he went through his inquisition and he survived. Came outta it harder and colder, but he was a better Grand Highblood for it. A better troll.

"Kurloz," you say, and for once you let yourshellf be reely and truly soft with him. His hair is still thick and silky-smooth when you run your fronds through it, and he's wrecked from your bulge in him and the fear that's been eating him ever since the cult of flesh reared its ugly head up at you both. He closes his eyes and he reely is just like his matesprit, because there's tears tryin' to come out the corners of his eyes, for all the hundreds of sweeps he's put into keeping himshellf under control. "...aw, babe. You cod it early this time, and you ain't who you was back then anyremora. We got this under control."

"More than _half the goddamn fleet,_ Meenah," he spits out, and you shoosh and move easy in him, stroking his fins with your hands and teasing his nook at the same time. " _Nnh--_ half the faithful, just torn apart, just fuckin' _damned_ like common SINNERS, do--do you even motherfuckin'-- _ah_ \--"

"Do you even raymember who you came to with your breakdowns last time, li'l angler?" God but he feels nice as fuck around you, too...shore you're worried about this cultist bullshit, the last thing you need is your clowns outta commission for a sweep while it blows over, but at the same time it's hard to be stressed out when you got this pretty thing all laid out under you, tryin' to get words out through his little groans and sighs. How many times has he come now? Gotta be two or three now, you figure, unless you missed a couple, and a shitload more that he almost got to before you eased off. No wonder he's so worn out. He can go a long coddamn time, but he ain't no fuschia. You got the stuff to go _all_ day.

"Fuckin' _ray_ member every motherfucking SECOND of that sweep," he grits out, and ohhh, _yes,_ you're breaking him down, when the stud in the tip of your bulge rubs his seedflap he actually _whimpers._ Oooh, he wants to come again, he wants it so bad. "Meenah, _fuck_ , make me talk or fuck me, pick the _one_ , you can't--have-- _both--nhh_ \--fuck, _fuck--_ "

"Can't I though?" You push further forward, as far and deep as you can go, and he groans long and low as he's filled, squirming around under you. "...'s eelarious makin' you try to stick two words together that ain't ‘fuck' and ‘me'."

He growls. Then he moans, real quiet. You ain't got the time to make him scream, and he's too stressed out right now anywayve, but for a second you're tempted to try.

"Look at me."

He only manages when he turns it into a glare. His eyes are still wet and bright.

"You gonna get through this."

He lays his head back--takes a deep, long breath.

"I din't say to look away from me." You wait till he turns back to you, resentful, and then take his face in both hands. "...you so glubbed up about this I almost can't fuckin' sand it. So you gonna repeat that back to me, now."

He growls and grumbles and groans. You laugh at how sulky he sounds.

"You wanna come, right?" You take pity on him and don't make him answer that one out loud--the way he shudders when you ask is plenty of answer. "...well then, you gonna spray what I just said back to me. Ain't like you gotta mean it, right? Just humor the bitch, right?"

He hesitates just a second, and you stroke his face with your fin-gertips and the inside of his nook reel soft with your bulge.

"... _'m gonna get through this,_ " he says, so quiet, and you give his horns a couple hard squeezes and kiss him and feel him shudder around you and gasp--quieter, and then louder, louder, groaning over and over with every breath all soft and choked as he comes.

When you pull back, he's shaking and breathing hard through his nose. He's gone back to clam-ping shut his mouth, but you know a won fight when you sea one and he's driptiding with your fuschia and his purple, his legs and the flat, pretty plane of his abdomen are quaking with how hard you worked him and his eyes look all glassy.

You wipe his face for him and shoosh a little on the way, and by the time you think to pull a bottle a water out and tip it up for his lips he's got enough of his pan back together to groan and pretend like he's gonna growl atchu.

"... _Meenah,_ " he says, after a long time real quiet. "... _c'n lemme out_."

When he says it like that, you know he means it--and more swimportantly, that it's true. You click your fingers twice and the pailing platform gives up its prisoner, retreating the cuffs back into the sheaths that hide them away. Kurloz sits up real slow, rubbing at his wrists, and don't look at you for a long time.

\--

Your name is Kurloz Makara and you feel like you could sleep for a perigee and then do nothing but eat and drink and laze around for another two. Every fucking bit of you aches. There's muscles you forgot you even had complaining their workout even now, you don't figure you wanna think about how sore you'll be tomorrow. Your bulge throbs both worst and best, of-fucking-course, because Meenah's a torturer at heart just like you but she ain't got the good motherfucking decency to drive trolls witless with pain like a sane-ass motherfucker. No, she's gotta just get your bulge out and keep playing and _playing_ and fucking PLAYING.

Your sheath twitches worn out and weak at the memory, but there's muscles all through your hips that ache at that and you breathe in and out and do your best not to groan out loud as you shift around to sit careful on the side of the platform. Fucking hell your nook feels all short of fuck-bruised, all fuckin' delicate and achy. Some animal bit of your thinkpan wants you to purr and maybe cry, and you're reminded at how Gamzee doesn't ever fight the want to do that and how you're two of a kind, your body scrambled up and spat out again his. You sit still and look straight forward instead.

"...Vantas still in his cocoon, too," you say finally, quiet, and fuck her but it is easier to say now. To admit like maybe somehow you find yourself unsettled in your soul over the fate of the freak little mutant who won't mind his betters. "Fucker."

"Mm." She sighs through her teeth, scrubbing at her slick fronds and thighs like she ain't even fuckin' sore at all. "No sign, then? I been lookin' around for anemoneone else who's done this shit before, but..."

"...there's only ever been the one," you finish for her, and sigh out a long growl. "...figured. Mother _fuck._ "

"You saw him longer than me," she says, and you snort because hell, that ain't saying much.

"And I know fuck-all but how he screamed and what blasphemy he tried pourin' out on my goddamn hearholes," you say, and...yeah, fuck, you need a drink. You pull out a bottle of Moon Mist and throw it back. "It all boils down to _we got no motherfuckin' clue._ Freak as our little fucker is, he didn't even pupate till after the little heiresses had cocooned and grown. Hell, maybe when he comes out he'll be of a size he doesn't have to climb up in my lap to make out."

"He's such a cute little shrimpy scrapper," she says, and she sounds all fond at him, just the thought. "Pity to not stick my bulge in him before he changed over, but..." she shrugs. "He ain't like your buoy. When shit's too big for him it's too glubbin' big, and I ain't too keen on seain' him cry."

You bide quiet a while.

"Shouldn't've killed the mutant so early," you say, and she gives you a look which lets you know in no uncertain words she's not motherfucking amused. "Not joking, Meenah."

"Like fuck we'd ever minnow this was gonna happen." She sinks down in her seat. Pouts out her lips and glubs through her gills. "... _and he was a pain in the ass,_ " she says, real quiet. "... _wouldn't shut his noisy blowhole._ "

"Mm." You set down next to her, on the ground by her platform. Makes you feel all too young again. "...tried to shoosh me once, y'know. Before the end." You look at the patterns of her floor, the black and fuschia. "...Told you that, right?"

She looks at you sharp. "You never atolld me any such glubbin' fin."

She sounds like there's a question there, but she doesn't ask it in words so you ignore it. Keep looking down and ahead. Sit there silent.

She breaks the silence again.

"...did it work?"

You think about his eyes so burning hot and bright and blasphemous, his mouth as shouted heretic untruths shaping soft soothing toward you. You had a mind to tear his jawbones out his thinkpan. You should've wanted to hurt him, see his freak blood painting your hands as he rattled out, but you didn't want to hurt him. Never lied to yourself to think on rescuing him either, but you wanted...

...you wanted to kill him fast. You threw yourself against it, fought and struggled at it and had him strung up in irons instead to burn and die. Watched and wanted to kill him every second of his suffering. Crush his pretty head in and end it. Kill him fast, don't make him hurt, kill him fast _kill him fast he's screaming._ You didn't find a single ache of want in you for when he screamed. You watched joyless-empty as blood slid down his arms and his face twisted and his body bent with suffering.

He looked at you once, before it was over. He looked at you and those eyes he looked on even you with so softly were icy red, cold like the first burn of metal heated too hot to touch, and you'd have sworn in that second you didn't have a single gasp of air in your whole cold corpse but they tell you that's when you told the executioner to end it.

"...yeah," you say, and crack a skull in half from your sylladex to pull out a bottle of elixir. She's watching you. You don't look up at her. "...figure it motherfuckin' did."

\--

Kurloz comes back tired and aged and worn, grabs you and pulls you in to kiss without a word. You don't need a motherfuckin' word--you feel the same dread hurting in yourself as you see in him, and you bite his lip and breathe a sob against his lips when that makes him crush you up hard against him. He's not warm. He's not Karkat.

The other kin in the Big Top with you, standing guard round Karkat's cocoon, get right the fuck out your way as he puts his hand in your hair and _yanks,_ no motherfucking care or planning, just dragging at you until your neck bows back and laying his fangs to the corner of your jaw so his tongue can taste at your pusher's pounding under the flesh and skin. You hear murmurs real quiet, and a laugh maybe as the kin as where here do you the favor the little ones didn't and fuck off to let you get your sloppy makeouts on in motherfucking peace.

But he feels all wrong and tired and you know you gotta feel the same to him because he pulls back and looks at you and both of you got this helpless sigh in your ganderbulbs. _What the fuck is wrong with us_?

He breaks into the quiet first.

"...you were doing okay," he says, real quiet, and the words you've been holding tight in your pan shiver and twist and try to crawl up your throat in sobs. You grit your teeth down on them and don't not quite look at him. "...what's got you so fucked up, little one? Why--"

" _Fuck!"_ You snap out, and he goes quiet, wary-watching, motherfucking keen and close and cold and you ain't gonna be able to hold out on this if he keeps just _looking_ on you like that, fuck. _Fuck._ "--I'm--fucking--I'm just--" you hold out a second but then it breaks up in you hard and sharp and you spit it out like confessionanihilation, like a wriggler making out like he did bad shit to his lusus. "--I'm fuckin' _scared,_ Kurloz, fuck, and I'm so goddamn tired of this shit, why's he have to motherfucking go and get gone so long, why'd a motherfucker even _do_ that to me?! I thought he fuckin' loved--"

"You watch what you let out your flap there," Kurloz cuts over you, and you still again, all air going in and out, all tight dragging stretch from your neck and achy-ass back, all so tired, so _goddamn_ tired. He takes your face in his hands, so fuckin' delicate like you're made out of glass. Makes you to look on up at him till your ganderbulbs lock on his. "Gamzee."

You ain't gonna cry, not even no matter how fuckin' gentle he gets with you and no goddamn way no how if he gets so sweet and kind and you wanna sob in his chest like a little grub. Your eyes won't meet with his. Go falling away to the sides, wandering off to the black empty of Karkat's cocoon. You can't see a hint of him there. Some days you doubt if he ever even was here in this cold dark shell, or if he got stole away some time when you were dumb enough to turn your back on his precious little self. His warm body so near and you went and turned your back on it, didn't you?

You dream every day now the same, that you're right here, every place and sight and feel perfect. Besides the creeping smell of the dark room, oozing up in your thinkpan when you sleep, finding cracks between other dreams and drifting you in the dark, you find this place painted on the insides of your ganderflaps. You're there as real as you're sitting here now, and Karkat's cocoon cracks and oozes and... _things_ go crawling out, things unmade and things half-made and things made but by no messiah's hand, god, you wake up fucking _screaming_ and he's not there when you call out for him. And you don't have the first single motherfuckin' clue how to go after the fuckers who hurt sister Vetrum without Karkat there, you don't know what to say at the brothers and sister standing guard on her so good, you don't know what to fucking _do!_

You don't say quite so much to Kurloz, not really. Get out single words, in between breathing. _Dreams_ and _worse_ and _not him_ and _what if he--_? And Kurloz looks down at you with eyes dark and old and somehow sad, too fucking sad to bear.

"...I know what I am to you," he says, finally and quiet, and it's a shock almost to hear his voice so familiar and so close. His hand runs over your hair, slow and heavy, pulling you back in on yourself. "...wouldn't be any other goddamn thing, but...I know a troll's body and I know how to work it." His hand squeezes at the back of your choke, finds two spots you didn't even know were hurting and works into them. "...I could..."

It feels good, so fucking good just to have him touch you that way, to work into the places you're sore and tense and all tired as fuck. His hands are strong in the hurting spaces of your shoulders, and he could soothe you, like that. You do fuckin' love him and you trust him and he's calmed you before, he could...

You push back away.

"...you were off with the fishbi--with...the empress," you say, real small, and sniff and blink until your eyes don't water like that anymore.

He bows his head. It's not a motherfucking nod, quite, but it's close enough as you can tell he's saying _yes._

"You got nasty at each other," you say, and it ain't a guess. The marks of her teeth are in him, his fins are still flush where she must've had her cold fingers all over them. You see him shift how he stands and know beyond a guess. "...she fucked you good."

He don't move or say for a while after that. Just looks at you, eyes far off, thinking on shit you can't guess. Takes him a long time, but in the end he nods.

"And that's what you do," you say, and lean your head up against him, against the pounding of his blood in his thorax. "Motherfucker, don't take this like me shitting on your thing with her, that ain't my business to touch on. But...I--I don't fuckin' _want_ what you and her have." He makes a noise you don't know, not a sigh or a growl or quite anything at all. "... _just want Karkat,_ " you say, small and fucking pathetic. " _Shit nobody can give me, big brother, not even you. Fuckin' want--_ Karkat."

And he don't answer that either but he takes you up in his arms and slides the both of you down to sit, holding on by your moirail's cold cocoon, heads leaned one on the other and silent.

\--

Gamzee preaches strange, that day.

He preaches hard, for one; slamming down fists on the pulpit where there's a spot hollowed away and the sound goes booming through the chapel, raising his voice when his kin start to shout in agreeing with him.

And for another...

It's just strange. It's just...strange. He speaks on miracles, and how they're granted in ways strange to mortal thinkpans, how what you pray for ain't necessarily what's given, and how sometimes you ain't praying for the right thing or what you want will do nothing but hurt to you. He talks about mercy. And he talks about a dark room.

He talks about a sister who was chained by him, and you remember seeing her. (" _She lay next to me that whole long_ FUCKING TIME," he says, and his voice rises and shakes.) Of the many there, she was a one who didn't make it. She was a one who it was kinder to send to the true Dark Carnival than to leave living and shattered. ("--they sawed her leg off her and her hand was on my arm so goddamn tight while she was screaming and by the time messiahs' eyes turned back to us and brought salvation on down it wasn't...she wasn't...")

He has to stop. Breathe. Move past.

"...there's some shit done to a body," he says, quiet and broken, "...that won't be fixed or lived through."

Soft murmuring. You all know it true, that there's a place beyond faith and tech and stitches and a troll's will to live. There's a place down the road to the Dark Carnival where you've walked too far to come back.

"...that sister was in pain, and Messiahs sent their mercy," Gamzee says, and his voice shakes. The block is quiet as like it was empty, but you can feel them all watching. All them listening. You can feel it. "... _mercy was a knife._ "

"...and I thought mercy was death."

The air goes out of you.

"I thought mercy was death," he says again, pure conviction, truth so strong in him it could cut iron, and you stand in the back, still and silent, and don't breathe. "I prayed to our Messiahs that they would bring fire from the great black empty and we'd all go up in it and it would be that much fucking _faster_ and it would stop the hurting on the brothers and sisters that got thrown down in there with me. I did pray right then that I'd never have to open my ganderflaps to light again, because light meant unfunny motherfucking torment all comin' down on us all! Mercy was dark, mercy was _death--!_ I prayed--"

His voice shakes silent for a second. Nobody moves, not a single fucker breathes. They're all here with him, all the family witnessing on his struggling to say something that _means_ shit, something real. You can feel them all hoping for him like hands reaching out to lift him up.

"... _prayed I'd come to hate pain too,_ " he says finally, so small. "...Better that than watching them fuck up my brothers and sisters, better _suffering_ with my fucking family than the shit they did instead of hurting me. I thought--thought mercy was suffering."

The picture flashes through your pan--a lowblood holding him down where he thrashed chained against the wall, fighting and struggling and howling for them to leave the ones he loved alone. The screaming and wailing around him and hands and bodies taking ownership of him unwanted, voices whispering _don't you wish we were doing that to_ you, _freak?_ He's silent, breathing, and there's a rumble of hate and dislike from the gathered faithful at the thought of what was done to the bodies of the church. A few hands raise in blessing--Gamzee catches a sight of them and his eyes go wide and then fall to his hands, knotted up shaking on the pulpit in front of him. His eyes are wet and bright.

"...there are some here," he says, like every word is a fight at first, but growing and gaining and more solid every time. "...some who know the same _fuckery_ I did--you coming back to us, kin, that shit's miraculous and that's motherfuckin' mercy, right there." ( _Preach!_ Someone cries out, and there are murmurs, thankful voices.) "--did you hope for that shit, then? Did you pray for rescuing, dare our lords would think so highly of you as to grant?"

There's a murmur, low rumble of dissent, heads shaking.

"Your prayers weren't answered." ( _No!_ they hear the shaking in his voice now, the belief and the hurting making the words tremble out of him and they answer back, they answer back so loud and clear and not just to his words) "Because you don't dare see what they got in store for you, kin, you can't even fuckin' _dream!_ " (and they're rising now, their eyes are on fire, and you close your eyes and raise your hands and breathe _faith_ ) " _Pray_ with me!"

It gets unclear after that. You keep flash-shots of the day in your head; of the way Gamzee drew up taller as he started to gather himself, as he started to let the hurting and the gratitude and the faith consume him, how for some seconds he looked like the face you see in the mirror, grown and strong and older than he has the right to be. _GET ROWDY YOU GODDAMN FREAKS,_ his voice echoes in your head, laughing and lit up and _good._ _ASK WHAT YOU WANT AND GET WHAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU MOTHERFUCKING NEEDED._ And okay, maybe the benches got shoved out of the way and the yelling and whooping and howling rose to the stars and people were pulling drinks and elixir was thick in the air. Singing was rising, you think, praise and shouting, colors and mayhem, you'd gone and shoved through to find Gamzee and you remember one last thing clear as glass, which is how he looked up at you laughing, how his tears glittered down his face in all bright miracle colors.

You don't remember really what happened after that, but you're sure as all motherfuck you wrecked the chapel pretty good. God but you're hung the fuck over.

You take stock of where you're at, now you know how you got there. Your block. You're in your coon--Gamzee is sleeping on you, which is not a surprise, but he is also stark naked, which is slightly moreso. Your horns ache.

You look out at your room, and find that there's a load of your shit scattered on the ground like you threw it there--right. Yeah, he did sit his ass on your desk without looking if it was empty or not. You'd been pulling your clothes off and hadn't been in a state to tell him to mind, being as how you were dropping your whole sylladex everywhere and making a great motherfucking deal of noise about how great he'd looked up there and how bad you wanted to do the more truly motherfucking _awful_ things to him while he prayed, which you find your ears a touch warm to think about now. Yeah, there's...a big purple smear on the wall, which would likely be where you slammed him up against it, sank your fangs down hard in the back of his neck and fucked him like you were tryin' to set a record. You can see where his hands dragged across the wall, trailing fingerprints. His hands had blood on them, god knows where from. Probably you had him bleeding from....somewhere. Hell if you know.

You blink and try to turn your head to look down at yourself. Fuck. Ow.

You're naked too, turns out. Gamzee's head rests on your thorax, at the bottom of a truly colorful trail of little bruises you don't recall him putting there. His eyes are shut--his paint is smeared real fuckin' bad and he's got his fingers in his mouth again, chewing on them while he dreams. It's cute as fuck. His knee is also jammed up close against your nook and the bottommost edge of your sheath, which is a mighty motherfuckin' distraction but you're still sleepy as fuck and you don't want to wake him up to get off.

You wonder if you could just...just sorta...reach over...

You let the low, sweet buzz of your voodoos hum through your horns, close your eyes and slip into nowhere.

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara. You're new on the fleet and you just walked in on the first day of schoolfeeding and then remembered you ain't got fuck-all on your face. You're fucking _naked_ in the middle of the block and everybody is pointing at you and laughing their asses off.

And then the feeder turns to look at you, and he looks nothing like but your pan tells you _oh, Kurloz teaches schoolfeeding_? And of course it's him. You don't know how you ever didn't recognize him. Your face stays bare, but you forget being as how you were, so small and a wiggler still. All suddenly, you're grown. You always were.

"And what are we to make of this...shameful fuckery?" Kurloz says, and his voice is the most solid thing you've heard. Things fade and come back again around the edges of your seeing--you don't notice. "You lookin' for punishment, wriggler? Because that's what sure the fuck you're gonna get. Front of the block, _now._ "

You slink up there bare and shamed and facing down at the ground, trying to not let them see--he don't let you get away with that. One big hand goes snapping out and takes the back of your neck, turning you up toward them so you're lit up bright and naked and blushed up hot. Lets you stand there for a second for them to get their look on at and then with just a push he folds you down over the desk, held there like you'd be by chains and ropes, face against the wood. His other hand takes a handful of your ass and gropes hard and slow. You moan at the feel of it and then blush hard and hot as the kin sitting watching you watch you. They don't look at you unkind--some with hunger even, and the bit of you that knows you're dreaming wonders blushing if that's Kurloz's want, if he's slipped in on your dreams there too. They look at you like they'd like to be fuckin' you like you know he's planning to get to doing.

"You come on in here for all to fuckin' see, bare-naked and shit, little brother," Kurloz says, and pinches your ass just for the reason of making you squeak. "Downright motherfuckin' whorish."

Nods, _fair words, speaks true_ all around the block. You're burning. Can't look a single fucker in the eye.

"...but being as how it's first offense and all, I'm inclined to go easy," Kurloz says, sweet and sugar and cruel. "...if a little motherfucker's willing to go public and get his repent on."

His fingers find your nook and press. Your thinkpan gotta try to remember what it feels like, being touched so--a second late it comes to you and you cry out the pleasure of it and thrash--he reaches out with a big hand on your back and shoves you flat again.

"So?"

" _Repent,_ " you pick, gasping. "Yeah, please, gonna-- _fuck--"_

He barely lets to wait on the first word before he yanks your pants down your hips, shoves your shirt up so he's got your back bared from neck down to the backs of your knees. Around the block, kin murmur hunger and anticipation and laugh at you held up there, an example. Behind you, a sylladex opens and then there's thin knotted leather strips running real slow over the lower of your back and down your sides.

The pain and the hit and the _crack_ all come together and not together, both--hurt happens, has to do because god but you feel the first run up through you, slow and beautiful. Things move too slow and too fast, blurry around the edges; the kin in the feedblock laugh and mutter and your fins are burning as they stare at your naked face, twisting at the pleasure. Your own voice comes out far-off and echoing as you gasp and groan. Mother _fucker_ but that's good, so fuckin' strange but so sweet.

Another hit, another one after, sharp one after the other, then a long wait as the pain of that sinks in--numb-dull-sharp and settling to a heavy throb where he hit you, all the places all the strips of leather snapped on your skin. _Snap_ and a wait. _Snap-snap-snap_ \--and a wait as you pant and squirm and do your best at not drooling on the desk.

His breath warms your auricular shell, flutters your fins. " _So?_ " He breathes, and his fangs nip your fin, sharp little sting the burns through your bones. " _What do you say, little one?_ "

" _Kurloz,_ " you get out, and he bites again, the pain is the clearest thing in the whole goddamn dream, like a little star off in the sky brought down to shine up flaring-bright in your flesh. "-- _Kur--"_

"... _brother Kurloz_ ," gasps another voice, echo of yours but crying and broken, and the dream goes still so sudden it's like a video gone paused. " _\--p-please--_!"

You don't feel things change but you're thrown back out of the warm and sweet sex-smelling air and without anything changing you're all sudden back on your feet and staggering. The room is full of frozen faces, brothers and sisters not moving anymore. Kurloz is the only one still there and breathing and real. You're facing him now, dressed again and standing even though you never got up or moved. No desk between you, Kurloz's face clear and eyes looking past you.

You start to get your turn on--like moving slow through water, fighting all the motherfuckin' way--Kurloz reaches out and grabs your arm, keeping you turned from whatever he's looking at.

" _...no,_ " he says, real quiet. "Don't. You just...keep eyes on me, little--"

" _Messiah,_ " gasps the voice again, soft and wet, and you know the sound of suffering. You know the sound of pain. "... _brother immortal, why do you--turn from what you are--_ ah--!"

"I _stomped you out,_ " Kurloz growls to whatever stands behind you, and his eyes flicker bright holy purple, glowing and burning. "I am _not_ your _messiah._ "

You don't turn, but sudden and sharp you're turned, everything turning and shifting round on you as you try to keep up. Dreaming. You're in a motherfucking dream, right, you kept on ignorant on purpose, you wanted to let him play with you. But this is fucked up now. The both of you with your daymare thinkpans, your voodoos...but you don't know this dream. You don't know the brother who comes forward from the still crowd of kin in facepaint strange to you. His hair's shaved short around his horns, his wrists are painted up bright red and acid green.

"You never believed?" Brother is bruised and bloody, smiling like he knows Kurloz is gonna come round soon, like he's just playing at not agreeing. Kurloz's teeth are bare. "No, brother, you ain't a messiah. But they _burn_ in your blood--"

"Shut your HERETIC MOUTH before I _tear your tongue out,_ " Kurloz hisses, and you reach out and find his hand and feel it shaking, and you get it. You were in your own thinkpan, your own dreams, but Kurloz opened the door and he ain't the only one with the means to pry open a fucker's dreams. This ain't your daymare, not a thing of yours

This is _his_ daymare.

And he's fuckin' _scared._

"Tear my tongue out?" The figure changes--sister this time, head bared and wrists painted the same as the last. She opens up her mouth and it's a mess of blood and spit and flesh, blood _pours_ down her and her voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. "--you did that already, brother. _Where's that godly motherfuckin'_ creativity _?_ Where's the fucking _artist_ of cruelty we kin suspected all got our know on of?" She steps forward and you flinch back from her with terror unfounded, close your eyes and try to wake up--it's a thing you've learned, a little, dreaming such foul shit for so long, but the inside of your pan is all flashing purple lights and noise and Kurloz's hand is so fucking tight on yours.

And then it changes again, and this time the face is one you know.

"We could have been higher," says Kurloz, holds his head high, bare-cut to the roots of his horns and scarred. He reaches out a hand with a wrist daubed all bright and green. " _Higher than anyone._ "

" _Gamzee,_ " Kurloz says, so quiet. "... _You gotta get the fuck out of here._ "

"You don't want him to see me?" The other Kurloz turns his head on one side and everything is the same, every tiny thing about him, the scars you've touched, the look in his eyes like he's telling a joke. "Brother, you dream me so much we might be motherfuckin' lovers ourselves, shouldn't he get his _know on_?"

" _Your daymares--good fuckin' bit more chatty than mine,_ " you get out, for all it feels like ice pressing in on your insides. You're numb. Can't hardly move. The other's Kurloz's eyes are bright as awful stars and they burn the air out from between your fangs.

"Gamzee, _go._ "

"Little one," says the other Kurloz real sweet, and it makes your whole self go shivered up and tight because he sounds the fucking _same._ "They'll want you next. They'll want you, young and new _Brother Immortal,_ they'll want you as how they wanted me--"

"They can't fucking _have_ him!" Kurloz's hand is so tight on you hand it hurts, and there's that wait and ache as like I has to find its way back to your body--you should be able to follow it but you can't remember how to blink yourself out of it, how to wake in the cold and fresh of your ‘coon.

The fear is taking into you hard and hungry, and Brother Immortal steps up to you just as tall as Kurloz but colder, just as frightening but not fucking _yours_ and your traitor feet do the deciding without you.

You hear Kurloz hiss as you pull away and start to run--can't seem to hardly go nowhere for all you struggle to move your feet so fucking fast, and then there's a hand like steel wrapped up ‘round your frond and you're jerked back and up to a cold thorax again.

" _In the future you dream up he's mine,_ " says Brother Immortal by your ear, and his hand _burns_ where he touches, your body's all wax and weak like his being there turns you to barely a person. "That's how you dream it, brother, right? The two of us, me and my _holy_ little one, but he gets better use tied up bare on the altar for the Church of Flesh to get their worship on making him scream--" Kurloz is growling all the foulest shit, but every time he takes a step forward it takes him nowhere, like he can't ever reach quite far enough, and you can see in his eyes that he's still fighting the dream but it's not shifting for him. You can't ‘voodoo your own daymares. You can't banish off your own fear.

"I play Messiah Raging," Brother Immortal is whispering, and it feels like the hiss of his voice climbs in through your hearducts, wraps around your thinkpan like slitherbeasts. He's in you like your blood. He eats at you like poison. His touch is fear made so strong it boils your flesh. He's a daymare forged and hardened and dreamed a hundred hundred times and you can't wake up--hell, you can't even _move_. " _He plays Messiah Merciful, and we preach that story_ over and over _when you dream it, don't we? Messiah Merciful suffering their eternal war,_ suffering _wounds with blunted fangs and claws turned away,_ SUFFERING--"

The dream _pulls_ , all directions and none as you push at it in a desperate lash, pan aching, feeling your eyes hot from the inside. The voice cuts out a second and you gasp like you were drowning and fight in air, pull at the hate-cold hand again, try to force your pan to stretch so again and fail. Kurloz's fear is on both of you, and the more it climbs into his pan and makes hive there the more power the hand has around your arm. His power brings fear. His fear brings power. His laugh as he returns to strength _hurts_ in such a way unbearable and un-painful you cry out and pull away from it, and he lets you go a little ways and then pulls you back, like some poor fucker in a spiderweb.

" _You make a good motherfucking show, Kurloz_ ," Brother Immortal laughs, and you claw his hand--your claws come away red, green, red, green, flashing so bright one to the other you feel dizzy-sick to see it. There's nothing around you where the block was anymore, just dark and empty and Kurloz staring at you, how diminished he seems. Younger, almost. Smaller. His paint neater and cleaner, his arms less scarred, no lines on his face, like he was young again. Like he was fresh to the throne. "...but if you don't _doubt_ , why you still dream me so? They have ways yet in your thinkpan. Admit, brother. _Confess. Repent._ You doubted your Messiahs. You conjured up me, yourself, _Brother Immortal, leader forever in blessed glory_ amen--

Kurloz snarls loud and tearing and he's himself again, not a younger self, not the one he used to be. He's not bein' soft-touch or subtle with his voodoos. He wrenches at the dream like a fly in a web. " _Gamzee_ ," he growls at you, and you're reaching for the dream again too, trying to remember the subtle touch of chucklevoodoos and control and _power._ "Gamzee, _wake the fuck up._ "

" _I don't--_ " The air is foggy around the edges, darkening black and cutting into what little you can still see. "-- _motherfuckin' know_ \--how--"

"We could have kept the mutant," says the Kurloz who holds you, wheedling-soft now, and Kurloz--the _real_ Kurloz--jerks like he got slapped. "We would have kept him to bleed him out for _sweeps_ on sweeps, alive to play with for so goddamn long..."

"You jank-ass _pan-fucking fake_ BULLSHIT _MOTHERFUCKER,_ " Kurloz hisses, and his eyes are growing bright now, bright and brighter in the dark, he's not sharing dreams at you but owning your thinkpan now and your whole everything _throbs_ with it. "YOU WERE NEVER SHIT BUT THE UGLY-ASS WET-DREAM OF A MOTHERFUCKING _GRUB_ WITH MORE FEAR THAN BRAINS!"

His daymare holds you and laughs and laughs, like Kurloz ain't terrifying as fuck right now. You can't fucking breathe, in that weird gasping way you get when your dreams take you far under and dark and you thrash a little, weak, in the grip of the dream that haunts at his thinkpan.

"He'll know now," says Brother Immortal. "You let him in your heart but you don't _ever_ let him in your thinkpan, right? Who fuckin' _knows_ what a brother could get his peek on of in there."

"I don't need a _filthy fucking AFTERTHOUGHT_ like you telling him shit I can have out face to face," Kurloz says, but there's a fear in his eyes. If there's one place he's not got fullest control on, if there's one place for his fears to dig their claws in him, it's here. His thinkpan sears through and around yours.

"Well then you don't need him here, do you?" says Brother Immortal real sweet. You have a second to wonder what the fuck he could be meaning by that, when you feel a cold and deadly edge on your chokestem and hear him laugh so soft and close and _real_ in your ear.

It's Kurloz's laugh.

He cuts your throat.

You jerk up awake and gasping, writhing around with your hands up to your choke to hold your blood in the aching, stabbing slice that opened in your flesh--

The hole ain't there, the flesh unmarked.

You take your hands away from the solid flesh and gasp again as the air sears dull and aching over the ripped edges of your skin, as air fights and won't come to your aeration sponges, whispering out through the gaping hole in you, as blood flows up hot in the back of your choke--

You hold your neck and breathe and shake. The laugh is still ringing around in your ears, so much the same like the one you hear for a good joke or a sweet kiss and so fucked up and wrong the same time. Like his smile. Like the way his skin felt on you...

There's an arm against your side. You didn't fall asleep alone.

You look down and Kurloz's whole body is still, so still and not moving in the slime next to you. It could look like he was sleeping sound and easy if you weren't looking close. When you look close, you see brows pulled close and down and dark, face all still but teeth gritting so loud you hear and so hard you see the muscle go tight at the corner of his jaw. His body lies hard and still, unmovable. You reach to him, start to try to find the bit of your pan where your sense of dreams hides way and steer around his daymare out of the dark shit he's got himself into, but he flinches and winces at every touch. He snarls open and without words, through teeth that can only bite to kill.

" _Khh,_ " you say, and taste blood, you can _feel_ how it is to have a hole where your neck should be whole. Holy fuck, you been hit by kin's voodoos one or two times before now, but this shit is goddamn _powerful_. You can't start at guessing if it's just him and his strong thinkpan or the fear that makes hive in your thinkpan playing up on his power, or if every brother and sister as ever screwed your thinkpan did so gentle-like and not meaning harm. But holy _fuck._

" _Kkkhh..._ " you try again, and cough hard. It's strange to see how no blood comes from out your motherfuckin' mouth when you do. " _K...lllzzh..._ "

And then he makes the smallest flinch, jerks head back and away from you and makes a noise like _hurting,_ noise like _fear_ , and you pull back and hit him as hard as you got in you.

Kurloz goes from lying and still and snarling to up and awake and fighting so fast you ain't even got time to move. One second you're over him in a mighty motherfucking fear, and then next second you're pinned flat and down with his hand pulling your head off on one side, his fangs snapping for your neck. You jerk off to one side and his teeth drag fiery over your flesh, leave torn holes in your shoulder as they snap. You punch him again, fear this time, and kick out and strike lucky in the inside of his knee--he slips in sopor and half-falls almost onto you, great weight and cold and sharp and aiming to kill.

His fangs snap again and this time there's a great _wrench_ and your whole thinkpan whites out a second as the pain that goes through you. His teeth are in your ear, catching at the membrane of your fin near the top and he jerks his head and you grab him by the horns ( _can't let him pull away he'll tear it open and away he'll--_ ) and _scream._

Kurloz jerks back like the noise is a blow. He's panting jagged at the edges like an animal, sopor-slick and bloody at the mouth, eyes bright and pure red even as they start to fade. Shakes his head and blinks and snaps his teeth and squeezes them shut and blinks again, so slow and out of step with himself you see the flick of his other ganderflaps underneath the first. He's got your blood on his teeth. His eyes are wide and his paint is a blur and his whole self shakes all over.

"-- _Gamzee,_ " he gets out, and you ain't _ever_ heard him sound like that, so fuckin' young and so confused torn-up and fucked around. "Hhh _hh--khh--_ Gamzee--?!"

"I'm okay!" you're not breathing easy yourself--he fell hard on you and god he looks _scared,_ he's older and tougher and wiser and powerful as fuck and he sounds so scared, he sounds so fucking _scared._ "Big brother, fuck-- _ngh--_ " your ear pounds pain through your thinkpan, powerful-harsh and trying to turn your pan away to your body and how it likes the feel of it--you ignore and reach for him. He flinches up like you'll burn him. "Just a dream, just a dream, just an evil fuckin' dream, brother be easy now, come on, set easy now--brother _please_ I‘m freaking the _fuck_ out but we're okay--"

He can't seem to recall any word but your name, over and over and shaking. He leans down a little and you reach for him with hands that shake so hard you couldn't try for a tender touch even if you had it in you now. He flinches back but then your skin makes a slick touch over his cheek and he's dropping down over you fast and hard and shaking. His lips find your throat, and you cling on him--his head fits on your thorax. You take him in and pull him close, and his arms wrap trembling-tight around your waist, his breath shakes against your thoracic strut. Your head fits between his horns, in the soft of his hair.

" _\--‘s okay,_ " is all you can think how to say, and it's as much to your own self as to him but you know the both of you need to hear it. " _Okay it's okay we're motherfucking okay it's okay it's okay I'm still okay--_ "

He shakes and shakes and breathes. Takes him a long time to come back to himself, to let his grip go a little and breathe slower and more level into your skin. You watch the little bit of light that bounces up off the slime play on and over the walls of the ‘coon, and let yourself know he's there. You're okay. He's okay. You're both okay. Fuck. He's going still though, and the sopor's dragging at you and there's a cold laugh in your ear every time you start to close your eyes and you don't want to go back to sleep, fuck. You don't want to see him again.

"...can we move?" you say, quiet so not to startle, and he startles a bit anyway and raises his head, blinks. "...don't want--not getting too motherfucking--"

"...don't want to sleep again," he says for you, and you nod. His voice is all harsh, torn up, but he's making words now again and it's good to hear. He pulls himself up with a groan all low-long and quiet. "Dig that noise. Go on."

You slide on out, and find out when your feet touch floor you're weak at the joints. He leans hard on the ‘coon as he stands, both of you all shivering and bare in the dark. You stare out at his block and for a second your pan throws up pictures you sure as fuck got no want of; Brother Immortal grinning out of the dark, brother and sister all bloody with hands green and red.

_...they can't FUCKING HAVE HIM!!_

Your pusher knots up. When you turn back and look at him Kurloz is getting his self unfolded, straightening up; he stands bowed a second like standing is too heavy a weight. When he sees you looking, he stands straighter. But still he looks so fuckin' heavy. There's no smile on his face, even when you come and take his hand.

"...sopor's supposed to ease that shit," he says, and rolls his neck, _crack crack pop_. "Guess it couldn't deal with the two of us, badass voodoo-panned motherfuckers as we are." Sounds like a joke, but he's gone all grim and quiet and don't either of you laugh at it. You can still taste blood. Throat still stings.

Kurloz has got a comfort stub in the corner of his block--you sit there and he sits too and leans back there, looking around at his block like he needs to get his know on of every shadow. The screen right by you says it's two and a bit past midday. Your horns feel full of aches.

"...gotta sew this up," Kurloz says, and he sounds tired like you feel, like his thinkpan aches with it. His fronds touch the place he bit you, the sticky-slick blood you feel on the side of your face. "You okay?"

"Wouldn't be if I didn't got you," you say, true and straight with him, and he breathes out a noise you don't know what to think of. "Fuck, brother. My daymares got fuck-all set up to yours."

He don't look at you. "...wouldn't want you not ever dreaming like I do," he says, quiet. "... _not ever._ "

"That was them in your pan." You watch him go get and set down and thread the little needles. His hands shake so he takes a couple tries. "...the cult."

He drops a bottle. You gotta dive and catch it, banging up on the ground as you go all edges and bone-bends, and when you come up holding it, rubbing at your arms where you hit the ground, he's staring at you.

"They don't get to me," he says, and it's like he's challenging a fight at you, like he thinks you're here to call him out for weak shit. "I crushed out the rot the once and I'll have it be so again, I ain't motherfucking sc--"

You set the bottle one side and catch his frond. He freezes still, no words, just that wide wariness of ganderbulbs and waiting slope to his pinned-back ears.

" _I'm_ scared," you say, and it feels the same like to when you climbed obstacles and came down knowing your insides better, like how you feel when Karkat has you spilling shit you didn't even know you got your know on of about yourself. "You figure I got a right to it? And I never saw fuck-all of them, not this whole time, but fuck if they don't scare me right to death and back brother."

He laughs half of a laugh. "Of fucking _course_ you should get your fear on," he says, and his hand squeezes tight at your wrist. "--no shame, little brother, every fucker should, it's a poison in the church and god knows what blasphemy they're bringing on with them--"

"And you're scared."

He freezes up again. Hates to hear it said at him, but you're bound to the truth now, here, with him. Truth is your bones.

"You got more to lose to them than any brother struck unlucky on this whole boat," you tell him, and he moves fast and sharp, jerky. Holds your face in his hand and sets your ear straight, his needles sting in your skin. He's tryin' to fuck you up, make you talk wrong. Make you not think. You keep your eyes shut and keep trying to think in words. "No shame, brother. No shame, not in front of me and messiahs. Not--nhh--n-not...Kurloz, they fucked you up one time and now they're back and you're--scared. That's--fuck--that's _okay._ "

He pulls a stitch a tug too tight, and you reach up and feel that it's the last one, feel the hurting places closed up and catch his fronds as he starts to pull back.

" _Doesn't matter what you do,_ " you say, and feel the heavy motherfucking _weight_ of it as you say it. You lean in and towards him, kneel by his side and lean in to talk to him real quit. "Doesn't _matter,_ Kurloz. Doesn't matter. You got me. Don't give a fuck, you got me. Brother _listen to me, you do so good for us, take care of us so good, brave as fuck--_ "

"Gamzee," he says, small little sigh of a thing. "... _Gamzee,_ I don't..."

" _Brave and strong and shit, smart like hell and badass--_ "

He winces at kindness, and your pusher is breaking. His arms squeeze around you like he wants to strangle the voice out of you. " _You're so good for us,_ " you say, again and again and fucking again, close in his ear, holding him so tight. " _Take care of us so good big brother, beloved most brave beautiful brother--_ " He breathes something that sounds half a curse, and you kiss the noise away from his mouth as soft as you know how. " _...'s okay, I love you I love you I love you we love you I love you..._ "

You don't know how long you sit there--your voice goes after a bit and you just hold on at each other and rock real slow. Sometimes you feel him starting to drift off away again--sometimes you get to drifting off. You wake each other. No fucking way you want back to sleep now. _God_ you're tired.

So you kiss him instead, until he kisses you back. Until he holds you for real. Until your thinkpan starts to go soft and warm and the shakes start to ease off of you...

"HEY!"

You pull back and suck in air--you didn't even really make like to notice how you were running out, you were getting' so into it, fuck. There's somebody slamming at the door. You look up at Kurloz and see by his eyes he heard it too, and he knew the voice.

"GET UP!!"

"What the _fuck_ do you want?" he says to the door, quiet and groaning, and raises his voice up. " _Coming!_ Leave my door on!"

"I'mma knock it down if you don't get your ass out here!" The empress yells, goes back all to getting her pound on at it. Noise makes your thinkpan hurt. You look over at Kurloz and he looks back at you, and you both sigh the same time and push yourselves up on our feet .

\--

You're still groggy as fuck and your paint ain't exactly presentable and your hair is worse, and you trail on behind the fishbitch as she goes stomping through the boat, pulling you and Kurloz behind like whatever you call those big-ass space rocks that float around with other space rocks. Fuck if you know what they're called. Moons, right? What the fuck. Miracles is what. How are they even getting their hang on up there in the black like that? And _glowing_ and shit.

"Meenah," Kurloz says, and either he's a lot more clear in the pan than you or he's good at pretending like he's so. She don't answer--you're outside the Big Top and she shoves through the doors and into the dark, into the throne block. "MEENAH. What the FUCK are you doing?"

"I've had enough," says the empress, and she's walking fast and sure up to the cocoon and your pusher is going a hundred kliks a minute but when she pulls her culling fork it stops dead. "I ain't waitin' for him no moray. He's had plenty a time! Get outta mah way, _kin_ , that's a glubbin' order!"

The brothers and sisters on guard spare on look at Kurloz to see him nod and then they scatter. Fear on their faces would be hilarious except if she wasn't _standing over your moirail's cocoon with a fuckin' weapon out._

You don't hear the sound as coming out of you until Kurloz joins it with a growl his own and you recognize what it is--your voice, snarling long and not-stopping and sharp, _get away from my palemate don't touch my moirail kill to keep him safe fight to keep him okay fuck you don't touch him--_

"Chill out," she snaps at you like it's an order, and there's something cold and old and sharp at her voice that makes your growl snap silent. You stand frozen at her command. "If he ain't ready to come out by now he ain't ever gonna be ready."

Gold flashes, and the dark shell splits like torn-up paper, tears long and jagged and leaks its red slimy guts. She don't hesitate--don't wait or waver--she dives down tears and rips and digs down in, slime up to her shoulders on all her gold, and finds something deep down in, something she grabs and _pulls._

And there he is. There's your moirail.

He's not big, even after pupation--not big like you are, like Kurloz is, but he's bigger! He's less a handful now, a real armful, and you're already smiling seeing how much broader his shoulders, how his size matches a little now to what he wants to be. His arms are stronger, his horns are maybe even a little longer, and there's strong plates on his back as she pulls him out and up into her arms. No bent limbs, everything shaped right, and any second he'll be up and yelling now , with her yanking him so sharp around and him just hatched. Any second now and you want to be there.

"Karkat!" You start forward, but Kurloz catches your arms. He's staring forward past you, watching Karkat, and there's a look in his eyes, makes your pusher stop cold and dead inside you. His hands are holding you so tight it hurts, but you can't hardly feel it. You're still.

\--

"Kurloz," says Gamzee, and his voice is so fucking small, his eyes are wide and bright and there's a smile still on his face that hasn't died away yet. His voice shakes. "...Kurloz...?"

Karkat's not moving. Not breathing, lying still in Meenah's arms. She lays fronds over his throat, feeling for his pusher's beat, leans down to listen to his breath, and there's a fierce old look in her eyes. Same as the first time you saw her, looking down through the windows at the homeworld with that burning cold distance in her eyes.

"No," she says. "...not today _,_ not now, _not you."_

"Kurloz," says Gamzee and his voice cracks. "Why is she--Karkat? _Karkat!_ "

You hold him back because you can't figure how to make your hands work to let him go. In your head there's hands so fucking hot, a snarl that doesn't back down, eyes like the core of a planet, hot hate trickling down your spine and lighting you up, and all that is lying in front of you looking barely enough to fit in your hand. All that fire and intensity flickering out in that tiny, limp body in Meenah's arms.

Gamzee is making this awful sound, sound that tears at you inside to hear and then he pulls and you are all but pulled off of your feet as your grip is broken. He looks so much bigger as he runs forward, so much stronger and motherfucking vital than the boy lying in Meenah's arms all red-black skin and hair in his closed eyes. You don't follow. And in your hand, for all it's blasphemy to contemplate using it now and for such dirty heretic blood, for all you don't remember taking it out, the knife of messiahs' mercy is cold and heavy and ancient.

Not that it's needed. If you're a judge, it's too late for that.

"Get back, guppy," Meenah is saying, quiet and cold as command, and Gamzee makes a noise the like of which you've but rarely heard, growling and snarling and shrieking his fear in the face of her ruling. "I said _GET THE FUCK BACK._ "

He fights at you when you grab him and pull him away, but now you're ready you hold him tight and he can't escape out of your fronds. He makes a good goddamn try--throws himself up against your grip and snarls and tries to claw at you. You barely feel his claws. For this one time, your eyes turn unheeding away from his distress. You watch Karkat. You watch Meenah. You watch her lean down and turn his face up and hold it in one hand and then lean down--

You've seen the light before--not easily granted, your empress's Touch, not easy on the body, but you've been around her long enough to see it before at least a single time or two. The light rides his veins, pounds in his thorax.

And then it fades, and he  _breathes._  

"Karkat?" Gamzee sounds so young, so fuckin' small, and Karkat turns his head and looks for him and smiles with all his new white little fangs. Gamzee looks up at Meenah, and his eyes are wide and bright and wet. "--you--he's--"

"Couldn'ta done it if my buoy wasn't holding on so tight," says Meenah, and pets Karkat's hair. The way she looks at him is so fucking sappy. "Can't bring back from the dead. I tideally saved you, yeah, but you saved yourshellf too, guppy."

Karkat groans and blinks around at the rest of you, and Gamzee makes a terrible little noise and pulls away from you, reaching out, holding his face in the palms of his hands and stroking at his skin. Vantas twitches and shudders at every touch, oversensitive, shivery. But he reaches out anyway and pats Gamzee's arm.

"... _shhhh,_ " he gets to say. "Shhhhh." And as you step in to lean over him as well, he blinks up at you all sleepy-slow and blinks and growls a little, like a wriggler playing. Like a stupid kid flirting pitch on the home world. You shouldn't, but you thought he was gone. You thought he was fuckin' _gone._ So you lean in and kiss him, and you don't barely tease with your fangs but he shivers and gives the weakest, barest slice of a growl.

" _...god, what a fuckin' pretty little fighter you are,_ " you say in his ear, and he groans long and low and something...flicks up against your lips.

Some night soon you're gonna have to sit on down and take a good close look at Vantas, because you'd swear on your very motherfucking soul he didn't have stunted little earfins before he went off in his cocoon. But Gamzee is pushing past you again, and you don't have the time now. Not like Vantas is in fit state to tell you fuck-all.

"Take him to your block," you say, and Gamzee reaches down and gathers Karkat up, pulls him into his arms and cradles him up to his chest, real careful. Karkat groans. "Be _gentle,_ little one. He's still half-made."

"More made than he should glubbin' well be," Meenah scoffs, but there's a note affectionate in her tone. "...his plates are alreddy grown in and everyfin. Shoulda hatched days ago."

"Late to'coon late to rise," you tease, and he opens an eyes up just a little bit to growl at you. "Careful still, Gamzee."

"I will," he says, and he looks down on his boy like there's nothing in the world worth more. "I will, so fuckin' careful I swear, fuck...ssshhhhh best friend I got you shh..."

"Well?" You give him a little push. "...get your move on."

\--

Karkat wakes up more and more as you run, carry him through the silent hallways to your block. He's still all slick from the slime, but he's warm and drying fast and breathing and _alive._

"... _Gamzee,_ " he says, small and dry, and touches your face with hot hands as you shove through into your block with a shoulder and stand panting, holding him tight. "--fuck, you're a mess. Ahhhhhh I--feel like shit--mmnh--" reaches up and holds his head as you lay him down real gentle on the pile. "--goddammit."

" _Karkat,_ " you say, and lift him up close to you, move his hair from his face with fingers that shake and see his eyes bright and red in the new dark of his skin. You kiss his face and head and horns and hands and bend over him to press sponge-clot to thorax and hear the solid thud of his life in him. You're crying and you don't care. Bawling like a grub and you don't give a fuck. He's here. He's _alive._ Fuck, _god,_ FUCK--

" _Shhhh,_ " he says, and his hand pats awkwardly at the top of your head even though it makes him flinch to touch and god you're squeezing too hard you gotta let him go but you fucking love him so much and you can't bear it can't deal with it, can't--BEAR IT-- " _Gamzee_... _G'zee, shh_."

" _\--can't,_ " you choke out, "-- _can't take--if you--messiahs take me before you go from me motherfucker I'd wanna die I'd just fucking_ die _don't go away from me don't you fuckin' DARE--!_ "

"Gamzee--"

"I need you, brother," you say, hoarse and breaking. "Need you I _need_ you don't ever go nowhere without me please please please please--promise me, promise me--"

He chokes and shooshes and you cry so hard you feel sick and sore and used up. You can feel him getting stronger as he touches you, and he pats you soft and shaky and then strong and sure and then sits up a little and then gets himself to his knees and holds you for real, pets your hair back out of your face and kisses your neck where your pusher beats under your skin, your useless little gills.

" _Shhhh,_ " he says over and over, and his voice is gone deeper now, his hands bigger, he's not as small and he sits heavy in your arms, hot against your thorax. "Gamzee listen-- _mmh._ Shhhh. ‘M fine, okay?"

" _You were dead,_ " you say, and he pets your face slow and gentle and comforts, _I know, shhhh, I know you were scared--_ "You were fuckin' _dead_ , best friend--!"

"I'm fine now."

"You were--"

"Look at me." He puts your fronds on his chest--hot and soft and warm under your hands, smooth with new chitin but still him. Your hands look so big and rough on his skin. "Feel this?"

You open your mouth to make some kind of answer at him, but all a brother could ever think to say comes out a grub's whine, long and high and broke-up. He's so hot, pusher beats so hard. He's alive. He's alive, he's _alive._

"You're alive," you say.

"I'm alive." He eases up close to you and puts his arms around you, rocks you a little back and forth and back again, leans up to your ear.

"... _I'll prove it for you._ "

You have a half a second to go kinda like "--buh?" and then he's pushing at you, and you only stop to push back half a second before you break down and back and let him lay you out. He don't waste a single fucking second--his hands take your horns and both of them squeeze hard and sweet right at the bases where the skin goes tingling-hot at the warm of his touch. You suck in a breath and it's like you ain't ever breathed before. You blink and open your eyes new and clear.

" _Fuck._ "

He laughs, far off.

" _We should sleep,_ " he says, but he don't take his hands off you. His hand takes your chin and tips your head on back, so our throat's all laid out for him. Lays his hand over it, not squeezing, not pushing, just there, and you get a shake and shudder through you like you're frozen cold. "...I scared you. Fuck."

" _NnnnNNNhhh,_ " you say, which is about all you got goin' on in your pan right that second, and he laughs like you surprised him, little sharp cough of a thing, so fuckin' familiar. Turn your face and bump it up against his hand, kiss it messy and clumsy and trembling _he was dead he was dead he was_ dead--

He strips you off, moves you around like a puppet and you don't hardly have it in you to help him. You don't try. Every touch is holy blessed, so strong and warm and _there_ , moving you around like he wants. He couldn't do that if he was gone, if you were dreaming. Couldn't change and shift you, strip you bare.

"Your paint is fucked up," he says, and tilts your face up to him with his other hand still on your neck, one thumb up under your jaw where it's soft and so easy to bleed out, and kisses you real soft. " _I want to see your face._ "

" _Please,_ " is all you can get out, "--please!" and "Karkat--!" and he isn't careful and slow this time he scrubs it away fast and sharp and you don't hardly have time to be ready before you're fresh-faced and skin-bared in the cool. He can see it all and he stays there with you, keeps his hands on your face and his eyes on yours. He's not gonna leave you. He _won't leave you_.

" _Krrrrrrkttt,_ " you get out, most of it chitter and trill, and he runs his hands up your sides from the tiny ridges on your hips to your fucked up gills. " _Nnnhh..._ "

"...it's okay," he says, and everything and all about him says the same, _safe safe safe here I am I love you--_ "You feel this."

"Mmm..."

"You feel me." Over the slits of your gills, where you should be scared to feel him touch, but he's just so warm and he's just so motherfucking wonderful and he's _alive_ and you'd let him do what he wanted with you. You'd let him tear your gills out and unstring you to bits. He could _kill_ you.

He won't.

"... _I've got you,_ " he purrs, and you close your eyes and go under.


	23. Travels and Talk

You sleep better that day with Karkat there and hot and pusher beating in the slime by you than you have for weeks.  You sleep long and deep, through most of the night even—shame and laziness, sloth like you shouldn’t be showing, but you figure as you wake up a few seconds, curl up around Karkat a little closer and drift away again, the Messiahs wouldn’t begrudge you.  No single motherfucker could begrudge.

Even after you get up though, late into the evening, Karkat sleeps and sleeps and sleeps in long after you’re up, and he looks so tired out you can’t bear to make like he needs to wake up.  You get up and clean up and even wash out your hair, and when you come back he’s still sleeping sound, laid out still and bare and spread in the slime.  He’s so soft, so fuckin’ vulnerable, and you reach out and trace a handful of slime over his belly and up to his neck, pet it through his hair and rub it as gentle as you know into the roots of his horns.  The tight little line between his brows fades away when you do that and he purrs and his fins— 

Holy fucking shit, he’s got fins.

Your moirail’s got _fins._

They speak at you the same language you see in the reflection pane every night—flap lazy forward and back, flaring and flattening, when you rub his horns and make him content.  Once a claw stabs a little by accident and they flatten a second with the pain and then flare up and out wide when he growls a little in his sleep, threatening at you.  His chitin is darker than yours, almost black around the back of the neck and on his shoulders where the little dots on his skin turn into tiny pale glowpoints in the plates.  His fangs still go sticking out on his lip. 

But those _fins,_ fuck, you are going to do things to those he ain’t ever even _thought_ you could do.  They go red at the tips when he blushes in his sleep.  They go gentle, brilliant red and he mumbles what sounds to your ears like your own name and you really want to climb back in and lie next to him and hold him and touch him so sweet and so pale, try out his new body and find the new ways to make him purr and lie gentle in your arms. 

You count it a show of how motherfucking adult you are that you leave him sleep.  Push up away from him, wipe your hands off on a shirt and toss it off into the corner, and lean in for one last kiss on his precious hot cheek before you get yourself together and finally pull yourself away.

It’s been a while since you were out and around, and while you were asleep somebody has been spreadin’ word the hotblood cocoon up in the Big Top is cracked, its guts spilled and the troll inside made whole.  The fact it’s your moirail in there well-known, how you cleaned yourself up and dressed nicer tonight than usual marked and noticed.  You get winks and whistles enough to make your paint melt off.  There’s a ache in the air to a troll who’s been fucked real good, but there’s a one for trolls soothed and gentled too and you know you fuckin’ _reek_ of conciliation.

The youngest kin, new off-planet and so fuckin’ small now, look from you to the ones who tease you and smile, confused—you tell them not to even fuckin’ mind and cuff at your older brothers and sisters for putting that filth out where the little ones can hear it, and they duck off laughing and leave it alone.

Wandering keeps you for hours.  You didn’t know how _thirsty_ you were for talking, for touching, for fuckin’ _family_ until you came up and joined the fleet.  Until there were slaps on the back and ruffled hair and greetings thrown your way like there’s no thing more natural.  God but you love them, and you love that they love you.  It’s not till it’s getting dark back on Alternia, not till the halls are starting to thin out a bit, that you finally get your pan straightened out and start to figure you gotta actually _do_ something.

 There’s gotta be new missions come down from the Condescension by now.  Maybe some shit you can get done quick and easy, make useful of yourself while Karkat sleeps off his…well.  While he sleeps it off.  The missions block is up on the mainest floor, public floor with its small prayer-blocks and the biggest chapel and at the center of it all the Big Top, the throne room.  You haven’t wondered on how Kurloz is doing—haven’t told him about how Karkat’s doing either, and him so pitch and so gentle when Karkat was just woke.  You haven’t made your thanks at him for that yet.

It comes to your notice that you’re walking against the flow.  People have been walking with you—now they all turn and hurry off the other way,.  Little scalebeasts in front of a big shark—

You look up, and there’s the shark.

“Hey, li’l clamzee,” says the empress, and grins at you with her big white fangs.  “…you lookin’ all gullty.  You on your wayve to see him too?”

“No,” you say, because you know who ‘he’ has to be, and for all you love to chill with Kurloz whenever time allows the both of you, you ain’t glued at the hip and her assuming so rankles at you.  “You are?”

 “Got some shit to tell him,” she says off-fronded.  “…and some shit he needs ta tell me.”

Oh fuck, is she gonna jam with him?  God that sure is a picture you just got shoved up in your thinkpan, agh.  But some bit of you with no fuckin’ sense whispers at you _but you can’t just leave him alone with her_ and you turn and jog after her.  You’re as tall as her, almost.  Hard to tell, with her in heels and with hair and horns adding onto her, but you got longer legs for sure and you follow after at a half a run as she leads up to the doors of the Big Top and shoves them open.

 She closes them all the way behind you.  The way they snap shut goes echoing around the room, and you stop and look back, then give one a little pull—no, she’s got them locked tight.  You didn’t even know they could lock, but if there’s any single fucker in the empire who knows how to keep things hidden and locked away, you’d figure probably it’s her.

You look up and she’s already up by the throne, talking low and whispery at Kurloz.  The sound bounces around on itself in the big empty of the hall, hissing noises that cut through each other until anything she’s sayng you might’ve heard is cut up to shreds.  You come forward slow, not quite wanting to catch a word, not quite wanting to just let her say shit at him.  His face is real still behind his paint, but you don’t think he likes what he’s hearing.

“—gotta happen  swimtimes,” she says as you come closer, and picks a fang with one long claw.  There’s little jewels on her nails.  “Don’t go beachin’ at me aboat it, baybe.  You’ll live.”

“And what are _you_ doing here then?”  Kurloz says, and it takes you a second to realize he’s looking past her at you.  Got a look about him all grumpy and unmellow—you shrink a little.  Shouldn’t have come up here without asking, dammit, _stupid—_ “—always a pleasure, but I’d figured you’d want to spend the time with your moirail.”

  Oh, that.

“He’s sleepin’ still,” you say, and don’t add on _and it was a mighty motherfuckin’ force of will not to do shit to him while he was off away in sleeping so I fucked off._ “I was gonna go see what missions were for pick-up and all, saw this—the—her… _Condescension…_ all about to make it out to see you.”

“Decided to tag in on the grown-ups,” the empress says, and her hand comes up and touches your back, slides up to your shoulder.  For just a second, your gills try to flare under her fingers and she presses down and you try to growl and choke on it as your pan tells you you can’t breathe—

Her claws jab at the flesh as she pulls back and your growl comes out like pitch porn, nerves and lust and dislike getting it’s boil on in you something _fierce._  

“ _Leave him_ alone,” Kurloz says, stern and snapping.  “Fucking serious, Meenah, I won’t have last time again.  Leave your pitch for a fucker who’ll take it better”

"Oh, you think you could _take it better_?" she sways up close to him, got her fronds on his face like she's about to shoosh and pap but pitch in her eyes and her fanned-out fins.  And you see the trap and you see by the flare up in his oculars that he sees it too, and that the pride burned up in him won't bear at him stepping a single motherfucking step back.

"Yeah," he says, real close in her lips, " _Fuck yeah I do._ "

“Okay,” says the Condesce, and she nips at his lip and even with the growl still dying in your thorax the heat in her eyes has moved on to him and he looks so fine and you try real hard not to whimper.  “…sit back and relax, _little brother._ You only just woke up…what.  Couple whelks ago now?  Can’t have you _strayning_ yourself, in your shellicate state.”

He growls at that, but ( _fucking hell oh shit_ ) she _shooshes_ him, reaches up and rubs his horns so he crumples back on his throne, fighting at it but losing, eyes falling all loose-shut.  She squeezes hard, leans up and kisses him too long and slow and filthy-deep to be pale, and there’s this sick twist in your guts because they’re so goddamn fucking _hot_ and you want both of them fucking you _(at the same time ohhhh god you would break in half fuck you’re getting off on that thought today in the slime_ ) but _Karkat_ , and them acting so almost-pale and the thinking of doing the same with your moirail makes you sick but _Kurloz_ with his body all loose and his eyes half-shut, the way he gasps to remember how to breathe when she kisses  him and takes him down into bits at the same time together, and he’s so goddamn vulnerable and you pity him so fucking hard it hurts at you.  She pulls cuffs out her sylladex and he tenses up but don’t put up a fight as she traps his hands down on his chair and puts the straps tight.

And then she glances back at you and gives you a toothy smile and curls a finger at you to come. 

You come up slow and hesitating and Kurloz looks at you as you walk, face all still, not mad, not happy, just still.  He’s like stone, and he looks the same as he ever did but you’re afraid.  You’re motherfucking _afraid._

“Willya just clam up here already?” Fishbitch demands at you and grabs you, pulls you over next to her.  “I’m gonna show you some shit you ain’t seen before.” And she pushes you on and up, up against Kurloz, up in his lap where you can get a good feel on his tense chest, his hard shoulders.  You’re gawping at him and you know it, lame-ass motherfucker as you are, but he’s a different thing when he’s tied up, like this awful, wild, hungry animal chained up and watchin’ you. 

Watchin’. Just getting his look on of you because there’s _nothing else he can do_.  Watching, waiting for what you’ll do.  You stare like you’ve never seen him before and he settles under you and makes a noise you don’t know down in his thorax. 

She still stands behind you, her cold hands she’s got on your sides and slide down and gives your ass a good squeeze and then a smack that makes your back go curved and shocks a gasp out your mouth.  There’s a hate burning up in your guts for her, for sure and definite you feel that shit, but it’s slower now, it can take its time.  You don’t have to turn and snap for it and Kurloz’s fingers go tight on the arms of his big chair and then loose again, pulling at them, stretching in the places he’s tied down.

He’s watching you.

“… _feels good, doesn’t it_?” he says, really quiet, and this time when he strains up at the cuffs on his arms you know it’s for you and you’re all out of breath and shuddering, watching him test them and find them stronger than him.  His eyes don’t leave your face.  “ _Feels good, pitying from up there?_ ”

“ _Yeah_ ,” you say, barely a breath, your pan is fucking spinning.  “I—I could—”

You don’t know what you want to say, what you could do, what you _should_ do and you stammer right the fuck out.  He laughs a little, and for all you can still see the tense in him there’s an ease as well, a smile at the corners of his oculars and a twitch of it to bare fangs. 

“You could do whatever the fuck you want,” he finishes for you, and you laugh once and small with no air and stare at him like he’s a god.  He’s watching you, and you feel his pity on you sharp as knives, pity from him who’s tied up for you to do with what you want.  Pity from him who you’re getting that kind of pity on of.  Pity from him when he’s… _helpless._  

He couldn’t stop you if he wanted to.

Maybe he sees the great icy boiling started up in you at that thought, because he leans in his chair until his horns touch yours, his lips close and breathe on yours.  He hung up stars and moon, hatched with the homeworld and born in the borning of the universe, he’s stronger and faster and smarter and older than you can get your know on of and he’s just— _there_ , just tied up and waiting on you, got that patient smile on under the smudges of his death-head paint.  Your breathing is a long, shaking gasp.

“ _If I want you stopping, I’ll just yell,_ ” he says, close and quiet.  “ _If I want you going on, you’ll know._ Don’t take a genius to fill a pail, wriggler.  Besides…” he hitches up his knees—you weren’t ready, didn’t expect, and it throws you forward onto him, drapes you on his thorax and gives him a space to push his thigh up and grind it over your bulge.  “… _you haven’t got me as dearly-bound as you figure you do_.”

For a bit after that, you just lie up against him and make out, all slow and lazy and bloody.  He bites and you nip back gentler and lick his lips clean and move little circles of your hips on his side—you gotta lean up on your knees to get to his face still but that means you get to feel all his long muscles go tight and loose and tight again, the strain of him trying not to rut up against you.  Don’t wanna seem _eager_ , not like he wants more—can’t let you have that, not even you who he trusts. You get to hold his face in your hands while you kiss him and for a little bit that’s all you do and all you want.

It’s a different thing—he starts to move like to press you up against him and comes to a stop at the edges of his moving, bound and immovable.  He makes a noise in the kiss at that and you feel it more than you hear it but it makes everything _throb_ wanting him.  You put your hands on his bound-up fronds and push them back down a little and he makes another sound, startled more, and then laughs and leans up at you to bite you and taste your bloody fangs.

And then he pulls back and takes a breath.  “ _Tsss_ ,” he says through his fangs, or something like—sharp little hiss, and then louder, “ _Gamzee.”_

“Yeah?”

He twitches the arm you’re leaning on, and his smile this time is a little tight and strange.

“…watch where you stick those things is all,” he says, and you look down at the arm he moved and let go so fast you all but fall back off to the floor.  You been digging in your claws without thinking, thinking of what you feel and not keeping a watch of your own movements particular—there’s blood breaching on his skin, purple wells, four for four claws. 

You hurt him.

You pull your hands back to yourself and every bit of you freezes up on you like cold space, sucks your air out like death in orbit.  His eyes go wider when you jerk back—narrow again as you stare at him, try to breathe through the fear.

“Gamzee,” he says again.  “ _Gamzee._   Calm the fuck down.”

“I,” is the only word that comes out, _hurt you, fucked up, didn’t mean to, am so fucking sorry,_ “—I-I—”

“Hey.”

“—you—I—”

And then cold arms wrap you up from behind you.

“ _I’ve done much, much worse to him, you know,_ ” says the empress in your ear, and you can’t fucking _deal_ with her now, not with you all fucked up over this, not with him bleeding down his arm and you _still turned the fuck on_ what is _wrong_ with you—you struggle to throw her arms off you and try to snap and she just laughs.

“Presh,” she says, and holds you pinned with just an arm around you, turns her face and _oh_ , oh _oh fuck_ her mouth gets at your fins, her lips all cold and her tongue just _feeling_ and that takes your mind out of it for sure.  Her teeth scrape and don’t bite down and you go still all over all at once, can’t even find it to breathe.  “...I think you don’t _get_ what a tough-ass old fish you got for a matesprit, guppy.  He ain’t even glubbin’ mad.  Are you?”

You stare up at Kurloz and he snorts like a joke’s been told at him.  “ _Fuck_ no,” he says, and gods and messiahs but how he looks when he rolls up his hips and twists lazy in his chair, you could die happy.  “— _mmmm,_ get him back up here already.  I want him.”

It’s an order—the empress just goes and laughs back at him, holds you there up against her.

“Nah,” she says, and everything goes—

 

When you come back into yourself she’s pulled her fangs out your fins and she’s got her palm in slow little circles over your sheath through your pants and the noises you got to makin’ while you were out of it are fuckin’ shameful.  She blows cold air on your fin—blood and chill and _pain_ and she squeezes your bulge as it’s coaxed out and laughs at how that makes you cry out loud.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Kurloz says again, and it’s considerable lower and rough like a groan.  “ _—such a pretty sight,_ little one, wouldn’t fucking believe—“

“You wanna do the other one?”  She sounds so easy like she’s offering grubcorn and the noise he makes isn’t even a word it’s this great _purr_ like he’d like no single thing in the world better than to hurt  you right now.  “Here, have him.”

She shoves you up again, up against him like a toy to be passed around and he nuzzles at your burning fin and trails his lips all bloody over your cheek to kiss you.  Your blood’s sweeter than the old brine in his—you’re getting’ your know on of the taste of your own blood and it makes you grind down on him and moan. 

Then he starts to lean forward for your other fin, and you lean back.  He looks at you confused—you look back, confused too by your own self, but there’s a thought in your pan now and it won’t get gone.

“You wanna hurt me?” the words come out all strange to you, a question you know the answer to with every scar hidden under your new skin, and he stares and then understands you and then snarls.

“You _know_ what I want, you contrary-ass little motherfucker.”  The words are pissed, but you got Karkat for a moirail—you can tell when somebody’s talkin’ shit and when they’re truly fucked up at you and he’s got a gleam of liking in his eyes.  You make sad eyes at him.

“Shit’s hurtful, bro.”

“Not as hurtful as my bulge is gonna be when I _fuck your pan out,_ ” he says, and there’s victory in his eyes when he sees how those words hit you, boil up your back and make you shiver.  “You do as you’re fucking told.  Come here _now_.”

“I think—”

“I said _c’mere_ you uppity little shit,” he growls, and he hitches his leg up again and jolts his  knee right up against your nook and then your other fin catches in a cool mouth and the pain takes you again like a hammer in the horns.

 

The first thing you see when the white lights go from your oculars is his face, his eyes on yours, and you’re the one who’s on him and he’s the one tied but you can feel your skin all sweat and shiver, your hair in your face and your lips bloody and swelled-up soft like you been sucking bulge and you have no clue how he’s still in charge of you when it’s like this but it’s fucking beautiful.

“And that’s what you get for fucking with me,” he says all contented, and pushes himself up against you, grinds and drops his head back to sigh contented.  Licks your blood off his lips.  “…now.  Talk at me, and none of your bullshit this time little one—how do you wanna get off?”  He spreads his hands, offering, making a show of how he can’t open his arms out full before coming up short on the straps.  “…your turn to decide.  Me being in _delicate health_ and all.”  That’s fired off over your shoulder at Meenah—at the empress, and she laughs behind you.  Her hands all cold draw the lines of your back, follow your muscles till they twitch and trace the juts of your bones.

You do, you know what you want, but…if _he_ doesn’t want—

“You’re thinking too hard.”  His voice becomes a sudden snap, a harshed-up growl that seizes at your thinkpan and takes you to task.  “ _What do you want to do_?”

“I—”

You try to get the words out and can’t, but he sees where your eyes go.  Rolls his hips up toward you and you know he wants to fuck you, right?  Right, that’s, that’s a thing he likes, you…know that.  You think you know that.  God, how the fucking hell does he deal with being in control all the time?  You ain’t even really in control, not really, and you’re all panicked up on the inside.

“Well I’m sure as fuck not gonna complain,” he says , and you jump and remember yourself and come to notice you’re sitting staring at his bulge through his pants, the line where his shirt rides up just that littlest bit and shows one sharp bone strut against the skin.  It looks to you like a toothhold, and your bulge is really motherfucking uncomfortable on the inside of your pants.  “If you get yourself readied up for—”

“No.”

Word sounds strange coming out your mouth.  You don’t look up at his face—keep your eyes down on that slice of black-grey skin, the edge of a chitinous epidermal plate you could run your claws all ‘round. 

“…no?”

“No.  I.  I just wanna take it. I want—”

He takes a breath and holds it there captive a second—lets it out a little at a time, little hisses through his teeth.  “…little one…” he starts, and you can hear him lining up the “no” in his thinkpan.  And there’s some bit of you as grew bigger with pupation, some bit with dark skin and long horns that growls at that.

“You asked what I _wanted,_ ” you say, and he blinks a little like he wasn’t expecting you to cut in over him like you went and did.  “I know what I want and you—” words choke off, but when you get them out it’s more a growl than words, echoing the voice he uses on you sometimes.  The one that burns your bones and rumbles around the room like thunder.  It’s his and you’re his and if you put enough push behind your voice it rolls out of you like a snarl.  “… _you’re gonna fucking give it._ ”

The pheromones hit you like a sun shoved in your pan.  Shocks the air out of you, and through that breathless fog you see his face, his eyes all dark, fixed tight on you.  You leaned in without meaning it—you’re breathing together, and he is so old and proud and fucking _beautiful_ , and tied down under you.  You would kill whoever saw this who wasn’t you.  You would fucking _kill_ for him, you would kill a hundred, a _thousand_ , as many as came near, and it’s so fucking frightening it makes you want to untie him and have him hold you and never leave his shelter again.  Holiest messiahs’ motherfucking _mercy._

“… _okay_ ,” he says.

You were not waiting on the word—didn’t even really expect, you thought he’d fight you on this and yet the word is there between you.  He’s looking at you with his head on side, looking you over, and there’s a look unfamiliar in him. 

“Your choice,” he says again.  “…just…don’t you fucking _hurt_ yourself, Gamzee.” 

You laugh all out of breath—he frowns at you, and you shut yourself up and realize it ain’t a joke and realize what he means and feel the pity bite at your insides like acid and fire.  “You know what I _mean_ , you—”

“Shhh.”  You get out your shirt, shove your pants off and fuck yes you were gonna check yourself if you were ready but the wet on your legs lets you know that much before you even reach down and touch yourself.  Second or two you just get lost, chewing your lips for the sting of where his teeth have been before, flicking your fins to feel them burn at you again and feel your bulge twist and your nook clench on your fingers.  When you open up your eyes again he’s lookin’ at you like you’re a fucking _god_.  “This is gonna be the motherfucking _bitchtits._ ”

He don’t look quite like you talked him all the way ‘round, even being as how you just made a really good argument, you figure.  But you don’t give him a chance to say you should be careful again because you cannot be _having_ that noise right now when you’re about to do what you been wanting for perigees.  You get yourself eased up against him, and his bulge don’t have any of his hang-ups—it goes right for you, can’t quite reach you but it does way fucking try. 

You see Kurloz tighten down his claws on the sides of his chair, lean back his head and close his eyes and it’s just him holding himself together like he does.  You know, fully aware when he feels good he locks up and goes still, but to the baser part of your pan, old and animal, it looks more like surrender.  You make a noise all animal-sweet and hungry.  He opens up his eyes again at the noise, opens his mouth to return it—

You slam down on him fast and hard and feel the pain snap up through you.  It’s _tight_ and sweet and  sharp as the lightning-crack as used to light up outside your hive and tie ocean to stars.  Comes out of you a scream, short and sharp but louder and more glorious for it, and he makes a noise you ain’t _ever_ heard him spit out before, great huff of air like you punched him in the guts.  His head goes back so fast his horns bounce on the back of his throne, his thorax heaves once, twice through slack jaw and open lips and you rock and keen and he jerks up into your nook sharp and careless and _painful_.

“ _Hhhhhhhaaafffffuck_ ,” he grits out, and Meenah purrs behind you but you got no time for her, just for his face, for how glorious is the _stretch_ in you.  “Fuck _that’s tight, holy—oh fucking holy and_ profane _fuck_ fuck—”

“ _Holy_ ,” you croak back, and press your face to his shoulder, breathe the smell of him and try not to keel the fuck over and die at how pretty he sounds—and all for _what you’re doing to him_ , at how he finds you good and good-feeling.  Words like those so sweet need something from you to even out at them, but words are a battle.  The pain is a sacrament.  His body is a tight, trembling lash. He presses his face in your shoulder and you can feel the flats of his fangs up on your skin, all that biting strength could crush right through your throat.   “ _Def—_ fffuck _definitely holy,_ couldn’t nothing this good be a sin-- _hhhhaahhbrother, not a thing_...”

“Hey now, scripture says—” he starts, as he’s like to argue, but then there’s a sudden slip of icy fingers up to the back of your nook and you _shriek_ and clench down hard and ain’t both of you capable of making words for a few seconds after that.  Kurloz is all rough gasps, short little things like he can’t get the air in. Your insides are screaming up at you from the clenching down, _too full too full_ and as it always has ever been that _can’t take more_ pain is so fucking glorious you’re keening and shuddering and making a wicked noise.  Meenah laughs behind you and Kurloz makes a noise sharp and snapping when you feel her hand move around his bulge where it meets at your nook. 

“No boring-ass clownfish debaiting,” she orders, and you snarl but you can’t make so good a show at her when she’s got her fingers down at the middle of the pain and her claws teasing for more.  “Pretty noises you two make go together so nice, I’d almost think you were clamcestor and desandant.”

Kurloz snorts in the spite of his self, and you laugh into his shoulder, sharp little things between breaths that can’t fill your thorax big enough.  Her hand leaves your nook, slides up your back and around and your laughing changes itself real quick to gasps and pathetic-ass whines when her fingers find your bulge.  She’s so _cold_ , holy fucking shit it’s like _ice_ —

“ _Cold as ice,_ huh?” she laughs in your ear and you grind your jaw shut and hate yourself for not havin’ the solid panmatter to keep your thoughts inside where they belong.  You always did say shit out loud when you didn’t mean.  “ _Think I’d like to hear the noises you’d make,_ little Makara _, if I tried that out for reel._   You been burned—oh yeah, he did always love things red-hot, our anglerfish, I know him and he’ll have tried out his hot knives on you.  Probubbly carved you some pretty scars too, but you ever been _iced_?”

The imagined memory of the urgent burning sting of ice on your hands comes back to your pan, follows her finger up your chest and gets a play on over your lips and when she goes to drag over your jank fins you make a noise you hate on yourself for and pull away forwards again, hide in Kurloz’s shoulder like a wriggler from just the fucking _thought_ of the thing.  You don’t have a single clue if messiahs care about your pailing life but you send up a prayer all the same because god _damn_ you are gonna die like this some day and love every fuckin’ second.

“… _yeah,_ ” she says again, and she presses up to talk to the back of one shoulder so you can feel her leave her red-purple color on your skin from her jagged-tooth little mouth.  Her bulge is a cold wetness on your back above your ass.  Her whole body’s softness and iron and her rumble spheres are pressed up all soft and cool against your back and the noise you make is motherfucking _pathetic._    “ _Yeah,_ I’m gonna have to do that some time.  God but you’re a tasty little piece of bitch-ass pail-bait.  No wonder Kurlz gets off on makin’ you cry.”

Kurloz growls long and low and threatening by your ear and the cold hands on you and the tight ache inside you and the soft noises of Kurloz stealing breaths and little groans are all winding up tight in you, every bit of you knowing deeper than thought _not long now, not far to go_.  God _damn_ but it feels good.

“So when are we done?” Meenah is still talking behind you, and you could growl at her if you weren’t still so shaky because it’s like she ain’t ever learned how to _shut her trap_ all the time she’s been alive and it’s pissing you off and turning you right the fuck on both together.  “Whatchu ink, Clamzee?  When you get him to come?  Whenwaver you filled your half of the pail?” and her frond comes out of nowhere, grabs your bulge and _squeezes_ and she might have you and Kurloz in hand both by how easy she can make you yell out and shiver and tighten down for her. 

“ _Or I make you_ fuck _each other until I’m done,_ ” she says, and the thought of bein’ like that, at somebody’s use and mercy, makes your pan spin.  Couldn’t bear it, couldn’t fucking _survive_ it, you _couldn’t_ , holy fucking shit and it almost scares you but it makes Kurloz groan real soft up against your ear.

“ _I’m gonna fucking kill her,_ ” he gasps, and you can feel his muscles move under your hands, see his face twitch and go back under his control, twitch again and gasp and settle and it’s all but doing you in just to watch this _happen_ to him, you can’t take too much more.  “ _I’m—gonna—_ FUCKING HELL.”

“Oh I fuckin’ _glub_ makin’ you do that,” purrs the empress, and you hear the littlest softest noises all wet where her fingers are moving down between you, far off and all blurred as his bulge lashes in you.  He’s so close to your face and you can see his throat move as she touches him, all the little noises he’s too locked up inside to let out of his choke-clot and too proud to bite his mouth shut on.  See his eyes far off as he just _feels_ , lids moving all fast and never-quite-closed, little quick move like your heart up in your squawkblister.  “Come on Kurlz, give us a shout.  _Make noise_ for me, little angler.”

“ _I fuckin’_ hate _you,_ ” he chokes out, and the pitch is a hot poison on his elocution flap, it’s in the shape of his lips and the twist of his head as he tosses his horns, wanting to challenge but tied down, not able.  He’s fuckin’ beautiful and you tremble around him, your legs shake up and down to somewhere hot up inside you.   His eyes find you and you know you’re feeding on him and him on you, the sounds you’re making, the faces, the feel of him in you and you around him, you’re just driving on higher and _fucking higher_ and _god_ that’s good—

Her cold hand takes your face, turns you a little bit up toward her and you can see her lip-paint all smeared up where she’s been biting at them and her hair all soft and black like you could drown in it. 

“ _If I told you to come now,_ ” she says, and digs her claws down at your cheek, drags harsh through your paint.  “…wouldja?”

You have to hiss before the words come out.  “… _nnnno._ ”

“Reelly?”  She drags her claws up to your fins and Kurloz is growling now, sharp little things on every breath.  She ignores, pays no heed as you jerk and growl against her touch.  “Look like you could.”

“ _Hhhh—”_ shit, _shit,_ wow— “ _…hhhhis.  To._ Nnh—! _”_

 _“Nobody orders that except me,_ ” Kurloz finishes for you, and you’re so fucking thankful at him it comes out your mouth a sob.  He’s got himself in hand better than you but his words hit in bits, stops and starts of snarl that shake the throne room—or just your thinkpan, or all of you _something_ is shaking.  “ _He.  Isn’t yours._ MINE.”

“… _’s bold of you, for a shelly fucker tied to a chair,_ ” she says, but her voice is different, ain’t so motherfucking _careless_ with this anymore.  Like she’s figured as how this is serious, not a game.  “Okay okay, fine.  I’ll keep my fronds outta this.  You want him to?”

God you want, you _really_ want it, and you make a little noise as he looks at you, little whimper.  He leans in and you lean in faster, eager and hungry and kiss him like you’ll fucking _die_ if you don’t. 

“… _not yet,_ ” he says.  You whine for him—he kisses you again, again, deep and desperate, he’s gasping for the air to make words.  “ _Not yet, not just yet, hold on for me—_ ”

“—make me— _hff_ fffuck—so good— _please_ —”

“ _Not yet._ ”

He kisses your throat so gentle and you sob and he lets out the longest, slowest sigh into your mouth and puts his thinkpan up to yours.

“ _…now._ ”

His bulge lashes in you hard enough to burn and the word shakes you open and as you’re torn right out your own head you feel him arch up under you and hear the most fuckin’ beautiful gasping cry, just quiet and cracking, buried in the silent, hot air by your ear.

For a bit you just go boneless on him, and everything’s fuzz and white and noise behind your eyes.  Everything’s your body and the light inside your pan, from somewhere far off and somehow higher up from you. Fuck but you’d swear after a real good one like that you can feel the Messiahs shinin’ right in your pan. 

And then you catch a smell, all small and slight but there and real, of the empress.  Smells like…want.  Smells all hungry yet, and you recall that the fact both of you already been finished don’t mean she did.  Shit.  Well you can’t well be fuckin’ _rude,_ now can you?

You turn in Kurloz’s lap, pull yourself slow and achey and fuckin’ great up off his bulge as it slips back away, and look at her.  She looks back, and for all of her looking calm and like she don’t give a shit if she comes or not, you know she wants to.  Her bulge coils hungry. 

“…gotta get you yet,” you say, and Kurloz stirs and grumbles as you move off him.  “Got a mouth ‘s works just fine.  Can make do for you ‘f you got a want.”

Kurloz huffs.  “…you don’t have to,” he says, “Not for this old sea-bitch.  Not if you don’t wanna.”

“I know,” you say, and that’s what makes you want to do it, all coming back around to itself.  You’re fuck-drunk and dizzy and everything feels like no big deal and you point at her and you’re not to her what he is—won’t ever be the same to her as he is—so you don’t try to growl.  You just talk to her like you’d talk to any friend you made back home.  Like you’re friends.  Just friends, with you naked and her most of the way there and slurry all over you and smeared up her hands.  “Well come on, get up there and sit on down, sister.”

She arches up an eyebrow at you, but you think there’s just a little tiniest bit of a second there where she don’t know quite what she should make of you, and that’s enough of a win from her that you’ll take it and whatever she wants to do with you.  You won, just a little bit. 

She walks up and eases up on Kurloz’s lap, and he shifts round till they sit easy.  Fits his head between her big arching-out horns and puts his sweaty face in her hair as you get kneeling and make room between her knees. 

Her bulge goes to your mouth like it’s been waiting for its shot, and you choke a second but she ain’t got nothing on Kurloz in the way of size and when the surprise ends it’s nothing a motherfucker with experience can’t deal with.  There’s a part of you that’s hard and sharp and bares its fangs for fights—you let it go quiet and deep down inside you, and reach for the bit that you sink to when your quadrants take you out your pan with gentleness and sweet good-feeling.  Let everything that wants to fight in you go still.  You rest your head off on one side  against her soft leg and let yourself go loose and easy, and when your eyes come open for a second they go right past her face and her bared teeth and her grin.  Your eyes find Kurloz, watching you tired and satisfied and eyes all hot and dark with love for you.  Just for him, you smile a little.  For him, you breathe through your nose and watch him and purr.

“The fuck you think you’re hookin’ at?”

She flicks hard at one horn and you pull off back and breathe and spit pink on the floor.  Everything that went all slow and cool and easy while you were spacing out comes back and everything from knees to thorax is aching and your throat feels all cool and slick and ocean-salty.   “… _lookin’ at my matesprit,”_ you say, and it comes out hoarse and a good motherfucking deal more of a mockery than you planned for.  “…’s a bigger bulge’n you.  More fun.  You got—hff—hardly even a motherfuckin’ challenge here, _sister_.”

Kurloz laughs low and soft and half a purr, proud of you, and you meet her eyes and grin and lick your salty-cold fangs. 

“Maybe that’s why you gettin’ complaicent down there,” she says, but there’s a burn in her eyes you figure means you hit a nerve or two there.  “If all you got goin’ for you is a mouth as easy to fuck as your nook, you ain’t half the talented li’l beach I heard you was.”

Oh what the _fuck_ , no she fucking well did not.  You know you’re getting’ played, some bit of you, but that don’t matter as much as proving her wrong and you push back in and slide three fingers up her nook and swallow her bulge back down.  She makes a long chirr like _good wriggler_ , but for all her condescending and pretending you don’t get at her you can feel her tense up and arch her back.  When she’s as deep down in your throat as she can go and your fingers are up in her your tongue an reach the nub at the base of her bulge—she’s got a stud through hers and fuck you want one.  You fuckin’ want one holy shit.  You’re _killing_ this shit, she’s got your hair in fists and her teeth bare and her bulge way down in your throat—

No, shit.  Wait.  You can’t breathe.  You really fuckin’ need to and she don’t seem to get her fuckin’ _notice_ on because Kurloz is way better than her and she ain’t careful like he is.  She takes and takes and ain’t as careful to keep watch, and if  she’s this not-careful at Karkat then you’re gonna have words to say to her about that shit. 

You twist your head and pull and get yourself turned so her bulge pulls out your mouth and suck in air—it stings, aches on the way down, and your throat feels all sore and salty.  You feel fuckin’ _used_ by her bulge and if it was Kurloz that would be nothing but hot but because it’s this jumped-up fishfucker the hot is also a good streak of fucking _annoying._

“…stop,” you say, wet and choked up.  You feel Kurloz go still—give him a look so he knows you don’t want this over and done.  That you just need a pause, a second or two to breathe.  He’s so fuckin’ sweet and careful with you, even when it’s not his hands on you.  “— _gimme a—_ hff— _gimme a second_.”

She blinks at you.  Looks a second like a confused wriggler, not understanding the words, then she rolls her eyes and lets go. 

“Thought you said I wasn’t _finteresting_ you,” she says.  “Now you want a break?  Make up your glubbin’ mind, Clamzee.”

“You not gettin’ your notice on when I gotta _breathe_ ain’t of interest to a motherfucker,” you say, and fuck if it don’t come out kind of cold.  Cough a couple times, clearing your throat up.  “—besides.  Wanted to see if you’d stop.”

Kurloz is smiling at you.  You feel kinda like you just passed a test or something maybe?  Fuck knows what or why or how.  Feels good though.  And she did stop, and you like her a touch better for it, so you lean back in and start again, slow and easy and letting your body let her in.    Kurloz has got his mouth on her fins now, her throat and gills and the studs in her ears, and she grins and grinds on his bulge to make him groan, still all sore and used.  But her cheeks are all pink now.  Her fins look to you flushed and soft and even more than before her bulge is just about making it its job to goddamn _strangle_ you from the inside, fuck—you’d figure that means she’s getting pretty close. 

And then Kurloz leans in close and you see his lips move, close and half-hidden in her fin and the cloud of her hair.  You don’t hear what he murmurs in her ear, but her hands close on one horn and one handful of your hair like steel and her back arches up.  She watches you like you’re worth getting off on, and you growl around her.  “ _Yessss,_ ” she hisses, and holds handfuls of your hair, pulls you in and grinds on your mouth.  The choking noise you make don’t seem to concern her, so you growl, but she just laughs.  “Ahh buoy you’d look so glubbin’ pretty just _wrecked_ —”

“ _Sobbing for mercy,_ ” Kurloz whispers, quiet voice layered up against hers.  “ _That’s how you like ‘em, isn’t it, so fuckin’ humiliated, but getting off on what you’re doing with them anyways, that’s how you like it._ Begging _for it, that’s how you like it—_ ” and the words make her rattle in her thorax, her legs are all trembling and her feet bend and arch tight.  He knows her.  He knows how to get to her just like he gets to you and watching him almost makes you forget to keep your mouth moving, fuck.  He’s so goddamn cool.  He looks so motherfucking nice.  He leans in real close.  “… _but you can’t have him._ ”

She tries to grab you by the horns again and pull you in when she comes, but you shake her off and pull back away because like fuck you’re swallowing for her.  She growls at you and he reaches around and grabs her to keep her from going after you, one hand on her bulge where your mouth just was and one on her chest kneading a sphere.  You get splattered pink all over anyway, but you were already slimy as fuck, don’t make a difference.  It’s the…what’s the thing Karkat’d always say at you.  Prrr….principled.  The principled thing? Principle of the thing.

Now’s the time, you think as she lies back against him and stretches out like a big slitherbeast just done eating.  Now’s the time you’d settle up in Kurloz’s arms and let him take care of you, selfish like you are.  But not with her here. 

You all sit still for a bit. All get your breath back together.  You lean your head up to Kurloz’s leg, and feel it shake a little bit as her hands move between them up beyond you, finish him up.  He doesn’t make that sound for her he made for you—not that soft little cry out of feeling good.  Just groans, long and low and in the back on his throat, and she laughs and gets slow up off his lap.  She strips off naked—Kurloz honks her butt and she swats off his hand and scrubs off her sticky legs with the knotted-up cloth and pops it in her sylladex, then gets out another tight black suit and pulls it on.  There’s no way getting her hair in order will change a thing.  It all looks the same no matter how many fuck her or get their selves fucked.  But she wipes her lips off and puts some on new paint, and she’s good like new.

“Whale, that was fun,” she says, and pulls the straps up on her shoulders.  Blows a kiss at Kurloz.  Gives a look at you and winks and licks her lips.  “Might fry that again swimtime..” 

She leaves Kurloz on the throne, leaves the cuffs there with him, goes swaying off to the doors like you ain’t either of you of the slightest concern.  Stops at the door, turns back, holds her hand up to one fin like a palmhusk.  _“…call me,”_ she says, far enough off you have to guess from the shape of her mouth, and then turns and she’s gone.

For a second you and Kurloz just sit there on the ground and stare after her, both of you all wet and messy and quiet.

Then Kurloz shifts around a little bit and rolls his shoulders up into the straps and you recall you got a brother here in need of some helping-out still.  “Here,” you get out, all blurry and slurred.  “Here, I got—I got you.”  It’s a struggle getting your fingers to work on the buckles she worked so smooth and easy, but she wasn’t fuck-drunk and she’s done that shit a hell of a load more than you.  “Messiahs.  She’s…”  words don’t come for what she is.

“Yeah,” says Kurloz, “That she motherfuckin’ is.”  He pulls his hand loose of one, leans over to help you with the other one.  His fingers are more sure.  “…little brother, you were a marvel.  Did good with her and all.  And she’s hard as fuck to keep up with.”

Makes your cheeks warm up like the fuckery you just got up to never did.  You duck down your head and rub at your cheek.  Your paint’s already so blurred up you can’t well make a motherfuckin’ difference to it now. 

“…you did so fuckin’ good too though,” you say, and look back up at him.  He snorts, leans his head back and closes his eyes.

\--

Your name is Kurloz Makara and you are getting too old for this shit.

Gamzee pulls the last buckle off and your hands come free all aching at the joints.  Gamzee leans up on you, boneless like he is when he’s fuck-drunk, rubbing his head up against you, nuzzling at your sore wrists and purring down in the pit of his thorax. Your back cracks when you lean to pull him up against you, brush his hair back out of his face and kiss him. 

“…s good?”

He’s such a fuckin’ wriggler when he’s worn out. 

“Good,” you say, and for a few seconds you’re just kissing, bare brushes, breaths against his lips. Then he’s breaking back away again, giggling tiny and shaky against your cheek. 

“…mmm…m’be all…worth her showing up,” he mumbles, and the warm fuzz fades away a little bit. 

“She didn’t just come for that,” you say, and linger a second in silence because you _know_ how he’s going to take this bad.  “…she had…I got a mission from the top.  I’m going off-fleet.  Four days, no less, maybe more.”

Gamzee’s still smiling for a second when you look down at him, but watching the smile leave his eyes over the frozen still of his expression hurts somewhere in your insides.  “I…” he says, and looks down.  Floor and feet.  His eyes are big and sad.  The soft stillness is easing off him.  “…oh.”

“…touch of distance makes a quadrant stronger,” you say, and he nods but don’t look up.  His hold on you is suddenly not for want of being closer, but a want to keep you.  Hold you, not let you go.  You can feel the need in his arms squeezing around you and his face pressing up into your neck.  “…when our condescension says ‘go’ I got no other course to take.”

“…I know.”  So quiet and quick you can’t make out a tone.  He can’t be read, in that second, not even by you.  You don’t know what the look is you see on his face.  Disappointed or scared or resigned or just sad. 

All you know is, he sure as fuck ain’t any happier than you.

“…how soon…?”

“Soon.”  And the only reason you know you ain’t as mad about that as you could be is how she made sure to fuck it outta you afterward.  “…tomorrow.”

He chews on his lip and bonks his nugbone up against your chest, resting there.  You feel words dragged out of you, almost, trying to fill the quiet.

“Wish I could tell you why, I do, but some shit got to be kept closer than that, to keep you safe as much as the empire.  You know how that shit goes, brother.’

“…mm.”

“Sudden for me like it is for you.”

“…I know.”

“…Gamzee.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

The words come out strange, so strange to your ears you gotta stop and think and get your figure on of how to say them, make sure you said ‘em right.  But he looks up at you sharp and sudden and his eyes are too bright and so grateful.

“No,” he says a second later, but you know him and you know how grateful he is to hear you say it and how angry he is at himself for being grateful.  “—no, ‘s cool, it’s—seriously, brother, you’re doin’ as like a you been told and no more’n that, no need for that.”

“And yet the words do get their wander on right out my mouth,” you say, and he half-smiles a little, just a little touch of a smile over the worry in his eyes.  You mean to say more, but god you’re worn the fuck out.  Comes out a yawn.

“…you…headed back to your block?”

Messiahs but that sounds nice.  “Hell yes,” you say, and you stay leaned back, not pushing, not reaching for him.  You know, you’ve learned, how he’ll take that.  Like an invitation, like a fuckin’ request, and he can’t say no to you when you ask.  It’s one of the things that scares you about him.  “You wanna come back with me?  Come with me, go to Karkat, go walkin’ around like a brother does—you got your choice of the day.”

“I…” he says real soft, and stops.  He kneels there a second, thinking, silent, and then he stands up and squeezes your frond once and then pulls away.  “…I gotta go pray.”

Fair enough.  You pull him in this time, just a little, for another last kiss, and he steals a kiss back, a brush of your lips on the corner of his.  His fang slips past the scarred welt where the last Grand Highblood tore at you, ripped up your face and knocked out one fang. 

“… _you forget sometimes,_ ” he mumbles, and he sounds shamed and quiet.  “…devotions before ‘coon.  Just…consider, brother.”

Fuck, but you know it’s true.  You work and work and worry and fight and fuck and fall straight to the slime without remembering your prayers first.

“Look at you, keepin’ me on track,” you say, and when you twine your fingers together he has a smile to spare for all his worry.  “I’ll get to it, brother, don’t worry.  You get to sleep.  If I’m gone before you’re up—”

“I’ll see you off,” he says, sure and strong.  “No, I’m—a brother couldn’t not get his self there.  Come on.”

“It’ll be early—” you start, but he’s already shaking his head.

“I’ll be there,” he says, and stands up straight and stretches tall.  “—I’ll see you off.”

\--

He’s there next night, sun barely down.  You got up early and put on full gear, going-out-to-be-seen gear.  Your strongest clubs in your specibus.  You figured he’d be sleeping yet, whatever he said—felt like a coward, slinking off in the small hours, but you wouldn’t have to upset him and he’d wake up with Karkat and it would be fine.  But there he is, small and skinny still, hugging himself and watching you order the last of the loading.  He’s a still spot in the moving and yelling and carrying-round of the docks.  His eyes are on you.

You know the chief of the bay real fuckin’ good.  When you catch their eye and jerk your head they take their hint as it’s given and it takes minutes before everybody’s got stuff to do all sudden-like, in a different spot that ain’t here.

Gamzee can’t quite look up at you when you go to him.  You know he feels guilty for coming.  Guilty for feeling how he feels, whyever he feels it.  You’ve been away from him for weeks at a time before, him busy or on missions and you busy or schoolfeeding or preaching or in council with the empress—if there’s a cause for him to be so unhappy and quiet over this, it don’t show itself to your eyes.

“Four days,” you say, and he doesn’t answer except to reach up for you and kiss you deep and hard and urgent.  God he’s so fucking scared.  You can feel it in every inch of him.  You see some poor stupid kid start to wander out to load something on the ship—she freezes and then goes slowly back as you pull away and breathe against Gamzee’s lips. 

“ _Messiahs’ blessing on what you motherfucking undertake,_ ” Gamzee mumbles, and his hands slide up against yours, your fingers lock together.  “ _Travels and talk and…”_

He chokes on the last words, and you know why—the last part of that blessing’s always been _and if it’s death that comes to you then glory and fire and a hundred enemies dead with you._   He’s scared, and he won’t say the word _death_ and you’re starting to get an inkling.

“Before I go,” you say, and bend down on level with him.  Keep your voice gentle, but leave no room for him to think you’re not dishing orders out.  “…tell me why you’re so fucked up about this.”

He chews his tongue, winds his skinny fingers together.  Little motherfucker thought it wasn’t clear to see.  Little brother thought he motherfucking _deceived._

“I’ll just be four days,” you say, and he hunches up a little like a wriggler who won’t be soothed.  You flick one of his horns.  “…little one, we can’t be together always and all the time, you know that.”

He nods.

“So what’s up?”

He sniffs.  Keeps looking down at his feet.

“ _Gamzee_.”

“—‘s not safe!”

His voice breaks a little, cracks loud in the quiet.  He doesn’t look at you.  Wipes at his face delicate with just the tips of his fingers, keeping his paint clear.  Not looking at you. 

“ _…away from church_ ,” he says, plaintive-small.  “…’way from family. _‘s not safe, is all_.”

“…away from _you_ , you mean,” you say, and he stares down at his fronds and rubs his fingers at the inside of his wrist.  Back and forth, over and over. 

“… _got a bad feeling,_ ” he says.  “Evil shit.  Like something’s gonna happen when you go.”

“I can take care of myself,” you say, and reach a hand down to pull him up against you, curl him up into your arms where he can feel safe.  “…won’t even hardly see any fighting.”

He sighs, shaky and cool up against your thoracic strut.  “… _I know_.”

“I’ll be fine.”

He squeezes his arms around you, and it’s a hard hold, tight with fear.  “ _Promise._ ”

“I swear,” you say, and know the danger as you say it, as you do every time you go.  You might be lying.  “Everything in my power to come back to you.  You know I wouldn’t leave you like he did.”

He presses his head to your bones, squeezes you hard.  God, if you could fix what his lusus did you’d do it in a heartbeat, but it’s too late for that now.  All you can do is ease and soothe.  Try to temper off the loneliness he’s got sunk in his bones. 

“ _…talk to me every day,_ ” he says, and you know he just doesn’t want to let you go. 

“You know I will.”  You pull back, not rough but firm enough he can’t cling.  “Whenever I got time.  Now go get some sleep, little one.”

He doesn’t go.  Course he fucking well doesn’t.  He watches you get in the shuttle-he watches you settle in and the rest of the brothers and sisters going with you settle down around you, and when you slip off into the silent black of space you can feel him still watching you, already waiting for you to come home.

\--

You watch Kurloz go, and _hate_ how fucking stupid you are because you know he’s not leaving you like—you know he wouldn’t—you know he’s not—

You watch the ship vanish off into the black and for a second the stars are light on the waves and the endless nothing is water, a flicker of white tail and horns like yours vanishing off into the water.

It’s stupid.  It’s stupid, stupid, _fucking stupid_.  You shouldn’t feel like this, why the _fuck_ can’t you just let him do his job like he’s supposed to without hanging on him like a scared grub every time he has to leave you more than a minute?

Karkat’s off on the empress’s ship too.  Says he don’t know when he’ll be back.  That they’re taking a look, seeing what’s up.  You want him.  You selfish no-good lazy-ass worthless lonely _needy MOTHERFUCKER—_

“…brother Makara?”

  Blink twice.  Turn and look and see a brother looking almost familiar to you, bit older and a lot more scarred up.  He’s smaller than you.  You’re starting to get your notice on of most kin within twenty sweeps being smaller than you, now. 

He’s waiting on a reply.

“Mm,” you say, and then when you figure that’s not even a word and shit, “—yeah.  ‘s me.  How could a brother get his serve on at you?”

“One of the feeders has need of seeing you,” he says, and ducks his head down when you try to get a look on at his face.  His ears are purple at the tips.  “…if you got time, only, anyway.  Says it’s, uh…about his…moirail?”

Gets you standing straighter.  “—big,” you say, “—across, like, big at the shoulders, lot of braids?”

He nods.  Still blushes.  You are starting to get your figure on there might be something there, but damned if you want to sort through another like brother Uderak right now.  You’re used up as is.  And if brother Travye is looking for your company, you figure you better save your energy for him.

“…lead the way, brother,” you say, more a sigh than words, and rub at the back of your neck and wish Karkat was here.  “I’ll do what I can.”

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you’re finally getting used to having feet. 

It’s been five days now since the day you were ripped out of your cocoon (and, from what the empress tells you, away from the edge of death_.  Everything still feels too big and too small at the same time.  Everything still aches weirdly at the end of the night, like all your muscles have been just slightly overworked.  Every so often you find yourself thinking longingly of Gamzee’s broad, cool palm and clever, strong fingers, but you haven’t had the chance to see him since the first day after your pupation when he came back to the cocoon reeking of sex and seawater-sweetness and mumbled prayers into your hair as you dozed up against him.  Next thing you knew you were waking up, Gamzee was gone, and your palmhusk was ringing up a storm telling you to get your ass back to the Condescension NOW!!!

Life since then has been a parade of doctorturers and rehabiliterrorists, yelling at you to move and mumbling about mutant weakness when you can’t or when you try but move too far, or when you hit something harder than you mean to.  You punched one of them, and it was refreshingly _just_ as hard as you meant it to be.  Smug pompous tool.  He went storming off promising to tell the empress, but you haven’t even seen him since so honestly you couldn’t give less shits about him if you tried. 

Some of the others are halfway decent though.  One big blue-blood woman has been keeping track of your coordination, which in her case means sparring with you.  You never even heard of shieldkind before now, but fuck if it isn’t badass when she uses it.  The first time you fought you’d laughed at her and thirty seconds later you were flat on the floor.

Now you can hold out for a good, long fight, and you can feel the power in your arms and legs coming back, settling in new and strong and strange.  You’re _so_ fucking ready to get back to your investigation.  You haven’t been allowed a palmhusk or a husktop since you were brought back to the ship—to keep you from “working too hard” apparently.  For the first time since you were three sweeps old, coontime is enforced.  When the empress finally shows up with new earrings for your recently un-pierced ears and news of offishal business that needs doing, you are so grateful you could fucking kiss her.  That, your docterrorists have informed you, is a perfectly reasonable response.  “You are young!”  As the most excitable one was sure to say as loudly and obnoxiously as possible.  “You are freshly made!  You are at your most… _enthusiastic.”_

The way he said ‘enthusiastic” left very little to the imagination.  You’ve resigned yourself to being a horny piece of shit for however long it takes for your libido to fade back to a manageable level.

“I know we just got you away from the clowns,” she says, and you focus on her words and not on her lips, her thorax moving as she breathes, her—“—nubs, eyes up here.  Coddamn bayb, you reelly eeling it right now, aintcha?”

“ _Yeah,_ ” you say, instead of something intelligent, and it comes out shivery and breathless.  Thank god she seems to find your incompetence and awful self-control cute instead of disgusting, because she giggles and moves on. 

“—mebbe later,” she says.  “But first you goin’ back and fin-fishin’ up what you started over there.”

You stare at her.  She looks back. 

“Go back to your morayeel,” she says.  “Get back in there and get work done.”

“But…” the words are stupid, they won’t come out of your mouth.  _But that’s just what I want_ and _but I can’t just be with my quadrants all the time_ and _but I can’t be this lucky_ …

She knows.  She knows you, goddammit, she looks right into you and knows what you’re thinking.  Her smile fades.

“Listen,” she says, and it’s one of those rare, serious moments where there’s no hint of a joke in her voice.  “…just ‘cause you enjoy somefin, doesn’t mean it ain’t useful to me.  With you I got two of the most swimportant clowns in the fleet right in my net.  You’re the _ambassador_ to my crazy fuckin’ freaks _,_ Karkat.  If somefin’s going on—if there’s in-fighting in my jugglators—I gotta know about it.  And now I do.”  She sits back and lets go, and you didn’t realize you’d stopped breathing until air rattles back into your aeration sponges.  “…so _go check on mah clownfishes._   Ambassador Vantas.”

You open your mouth once, then again, and realize how dry your throat is when your voice cracks.  “...you—you mean, uh…am _bass_ ador, right?”

She stares at you, mouth hanging slightly open, for a single silent second.  Then she blinks, throws back her head and laughs loud and cackling and wonderful.

“Right in fronta my face!”  she chortles, “—can’t fuckin’ bereef I missed that one!  Ah, what a good _buoy!_   You mah favorite little shout-machine, I ever tell you that?”

“More often than I desurf, your condescension,” you say, as deadpan as you can over the huge stupid grin that threatens to break through, and she snickers and pinches your cheeks. 

“Praycious.”  She pulls you in, plants a big, messy kiss on your lips and then pushes you back again, reeling and hot and dizzy.  “Go on.  Don’t dawdle.”

\--

The trip over is long enough to let the hungry aching lust in your belly die away.  You have to focus on remembering all the fine motions you needed to navigate a ship—it’s only been sweeps since you were trained for it, but it feels like pupating reset you back to before you started learning.  Your fingers feel too big for switches.  You think about how huge Kurloz is compared to you, imagine him slouched in one of these seats trying to work the controls with his…big, cool…rough hands…

It’s hard to tell how long you’re staring into space thinking about things you have no business thinking about in mid flight, before you set the ship on automatic and lean back in the crowded one-troll cockpit to…relax.

Relaxing takes up most of the time left in the trip.  The church fleet is never too far behind The Condescension, but they must be keeping closer than usual because long before you’re expecting it the Dark Carnival hails you for proximity.  You’re in a sort of dizzy, panting haze, and you have to pull your hands hastily out of your pants, scrub your fingers off and clear your throat a couple of times before you can answer the hail.

“ _Oh_ ,” says the purpleblood on the other end when he hears your voice, and you don’t think you’re imagining the amused, almost friendly tone to his voice.  “… _back again, trashblood_?”

“Back again, bulgelord.”  You retort, too mellow for more than a hint of a growl, and he chortles.  “Open up.”

“ _Honkelou, heretic_ ,” he says cheerfully.  “ _Get in and clear up airspace, we got the very King of Colors himself coming in behind you and if you’re still in his airspace when he wants in, we’ll play target practice at a motherfucker till you’re good and out of it_.”

You don’t doubt it, and as much as you want to slow down even more and inconvenience everybody involved, you don’t want to deal with crazed clowns taking potshots at your shiny imperial shuttle today.  You can annoy Kurloz in person. Without bringing multiple tons of rocket-powered metal into the equation.  You get past you would have done it in a heartbeat though, because past you is a piece of—

You make the traditional bumpy landing on outdated landing gear, and then stay in your tiny shuttle as Kurloz’s much bigger shuttle soars overhead and clangs into its dock.  You take comfort in the fact that even though his may be way bigger, yours is sleek and fast and efficient.  Just about sums it up, you think.

You climb out into chaos; clowns are running in from all over the docks, greeting quadrants, yelling and dancing around each other.  And last to come out…

Kurloz looks space-lagged and haggard, the look you’re seen on hundreds of nobles and diplomats after long debates and longer days doing busywork.  One of his arms is bandaged up, and there are nasty bruises around the edge of the bandage.  You want to bite them.  Right here, right now, no matter who’s around and might see.   The other clowns crowd around him, babbling and honking and generally being obnoxious, like a bunch of wrigglers whose lusii just came home.  “Biggest brother!”  one of them is calling, and “my lord!” and all sorts of ridiculous titles you’re sure are made up.  Some of them are probably meant to be jokes—at least, he gives a tired snort at a couple of them, and grins down at all of the rest.  (“My lord, we need—””can a brother just—””—minute of your time—””—for a week now and they won’t let up—“) 

Good god he’s been back less than three minutes and they’re already heaping their petitions on his head.  It’s not really a conscious choice that starts you moving forward—it’s the way he closes his eyes for a second, takes a deep breath and then opens them again and opens his mouth to start answering.  It’s the exhausted slump of his shoulders for a second that nobody else seems to notice.

“Okay, okay!”  You shout, and holy _shit_ but your new sponges can get loud.  “OKAY QUIET DOWN.”

A score of painted faces ranging from angry to disbelieving to amused all turn toward you.  Kurloz narrows his eyes at you. 

“As much as I’m sure he’d like to deal with all your shit right now, I have business directly from the empress,” you say, as loud and firm as you can.  “ _Now,_ Highblood.”

You don’t think you’re quite imagining the flicker of gratitude under the annoyance in his eyes.

“Thanks kindly for the motherfucking welcome, kin,” he says to the crowd around him, and his hands touch shoulders, ruffle hair, knock horns as he eases forward through them.  “I got an imperial nag on my head already, of-fucking-course.  Come to me again next night, I’ll see all and get done all as what needs doing.”

The clowns clear out, making discontented noises and throwing you dirty looks.  One of them elbows you in the side—Kurloz growls softly and the one who hit you cringes a little and ducks their head, vanishing off into the crowd.  They vanish around the mismatched shapes of the fleet’s paint-splattered shuttles, and Kurloz’s shoulders slowly hunch as the two of you are left alone.

But there’s one person who you know should still be here.  You look around, but it’s just you and him there, standing in the slowly-quieting bay. 

“Where’s Gamzee?”

Kurloz frowns at you.  “—I been gone four full days, little fucker,” he says, “—just got in and you here to welcome me and all, what makes you figure I’d know?”

You roll your eyes.  “Wow, right, how could I possibly expect you to know _anything_ about your matesprit’s whereabouts?  Stupid of me.”

He clicks his tongue.  “Messaged him two nights ago,” he says.  “He didn’t say much.  Said he was with you.”

Something small and cold whispers through your thinkpan. 

“Well maybe he just didn’t feel up to talking to you,” you say, “—because I haven’t been on this ship since the night after I pupated.  Meenah—” you stop, flinching for a second, then remember who you’re talking to and press on stubbornly.  “— _Meenah_ brought me back to her flagship and had me under observation from what felt like every docterrorist in the empire.  This is the first time I’ve been allowed to go anywhere.”

He growls and pulls out his palmhusk—you’re not surprised to see that, for one thing, there are gaudy stickers on it, and for the other the screen is cracked and spattered with unnamable fluids.   “He asked me to talk every day,” he says.  “He wouldn’t be _too busy_ for that.  Not for me.  And that ain’t vanity, it’s a fuckin’ _fact._ ”

You have to admit it is.  If there’s one overarching theme you’ve managed to weed out in all the things you’ve talked about with Gamzee in the pile—all the fears, all the bad dreams—it’s how sweetly, desperately _terrified_ he is that he’s a burden, a pain in the ass, that he’s going to be left alone.  In retrospect, past you was doing literally fuck-all to help soothe those fears. Fuck past you.  Fuck him right in the ear.   Gamzee wouldn’t pass up a chance to talk to one of his quadrants who was far away.  Every hint that he’s still wanted, he clings to like a…what does the empress call them?  Barnacle.  You’ll say this for highbloods, they don’t use up as many syllables on slimy ocean shell-beasts.

“ _Vantas._ ”

You blink and realize you were staring at the opposite wall, frowning silently.  Kurloz is pacing slowly back and forth, turning his palmhusk over and over in his fingers. 

“…show me the messages,” you say.

mirthfulMonarchy [MM] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]

MM: Gamzee?

MM: little one.

MM: come on brother its been a fucker of a day, PICK UP YOUR GODDAMN PALMHUSK.

TC: what.

MM: :oD

MM: just wanted to hang a little, little brother.

MM: took you like a FUCKING HOUR, what, you busy?

TC: yeah i’m jamming motherfucker.

TC: IF YOU WANNA TALK ALL A BROTHER HAS TO DO IS GET HIS ASS BACK HERE.

MM: :o(

TC: whatever

terminallyCapricious [TC] has blocked mirthfulMonarchy [MM]

“…harsh, for him,” you say slowly, and scroll back up the page.  You catch the slightest twitch of one hand next to you like he wants to take his palmhusk back, but when you glance at him he’s motionless.  When you stop at a random point in the conversation before that one—

TC: sh ittt fuck fhit please y es

MM: yeah you’d FUCKIN’ LOVE THAT, wouldn’t you?

MM: NOT YET.

TC: fk u ucjkk sdjnncknk

MM: words, little one.

TC: kkurloz xplease PLAESE

MM: you WANT IT.

TC: p pkkk fle ssss

MM: fine

MM: come up here and BEG FOR ME IN PERSON, motherfucker.

Shit shit shit shit FUCK.  You scroll back down, face burning, and behind you he snorts.

“You knew that was up there,” you growl.  He doesn’t answer, but you can almost feel him smirking.  For just a second, the tension in both of you is aimed at each other instead of some faceless problem, hot and sharp instead of amorphous and worried. 

Then you scroll back to the conversation from two days ago, and the worry comes back.

“…this is…fucked up.”

“No shit.”  He crosses his arms.  “Give it here.”

“What?  No.”

For a few minutes you get into a war of shoving and slapping and trying not to raise voices, keenly aware that there are possibly-murderous clowns within yelling distance who are likely to kill first and ask questions later if they see their leader struggling with an outsider.  He has way longer arms than you, but you’re quick and every time he starts trying to wrestle one hand open you snatch it into the other one. 

He’s hissing curses in your ear, and you’re less resisting because you have a good reason and more because you can feel all the muscle in his thorax when he bends around you like this, feel all the raw, barely-restrained _power_ of your hatemate as he snatches and shoves and scrabbles at you, swearing under his breath.  For a second you consider grinding against him, and that’s the second when he pinches your side so hard you yelp and grabs the palmhusk out of your suddenly-slackened grip.

“I fucking _hate_ you!” you hiss at him, but he just snorts and holds it up high, tapping out a message.  You lean back and blatantly watch as he writes, squinting to catch the words on the distant screen.

terrorizingCachinnation [TC] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]

TC: fuck

[TC] changed their trollian handle to mirthfulMonarchy [MM]

MM: got to change my GODDAMN DEFAULTS, I do that shit EVERY FUCKING TIME.

MM: where you at, little one?

MM: your little nubby-horned MOTHERFUCKER is demanding at me like I should know.

MM:…GAMZEE.

You both stare at it until the screen goes dark—no answer.  Kurloz sighs.

“…fuck,” he says.  “…little brother gotta be seriously fuckin’ pissed with me, turning away so cold.”

“Or he’s asleep,” you point out, and elbow him.  “Stop assuming his world revolves around you, god.”

He growls and shoves you a little, just enough to make you stagger, and your previously-forgotten hormones flare up again in synch with the prickling flare of anger and admiration for his careless strength.

“Well, if he’s not around to make grossed-out faces…” you ease up into his space, and his eyes snap down to you.  All of a sudden the tension and worry in the air are fading, replaced by the deep, slow burn of hate.  You can almost smell it, now.  You never quite could before and it’s like the air inside your thorax has been heated up until it almost burns, like your pusher is boiling the blood as it pounds through you.  “Maybe I should—”

And then just as you’re about to reach up and pull him down close for a kiss or two, the palmhusk buzzes.  Kurloz’s face brightens immediately and he shoves you off, deliberately more dismissive than he needs to be—you elbow your way up against him to see the screen and he snorts and kicks at your legs absently as he opens the chat client.

terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling mirthfulMonarchy [MM]

MM: beloved you have to ANSWER YOUR MESSAGES once in a while, goddamn.

TC: you aren’t wanted.

You blink—behind you, feel him go still, confused.  And then there’s a little _ping_ and one last line of purple text pops up in his inbox.

TC: brother immortal is done with you.

_Click_

Picture captured

TC’s PALMHUSK has EXPLODED.

The line goes dead.  Gamzee’s status changes to _offline._   The last message sent is a picture—a picture somebody took remotely with the camera on this palmhusk, and when you open it you see that it’s of Kurloz’s face, blank with shock and the first poisonous twinges of horror, staring down at the screen as if he’d seen a ghost.  _Brother Immortal…_ you know that from somewhere.  Where do you know that from?  What the fuck is going on?

“Brother Immortal?” you say, and are surprised to feel him shudder behind you like you just pronounced his death sentence.  “What the fuck does that mean?”

“… _it’s them,_ ” he says, and his voice is so quiet.  “…it’s _them._ ”

“What?” 

 “The fucking _cult_ ,” says Kurloz, and you jump at the sudden volume of his voice, turning to look at him.  His eyes are so wide, and you realize abruptly that while you weren’t looking at him, assuming he was just as bemused and worried as you are, he’s _panicking._   You’ve seen him worried, angry, frustrated—but never like this.  Never _scared._   “No, fuck, FUCK _FUCK—!!_ ”

“Hey!”  You can’t make him stop when you grab his wrist, but you do at least get his attention—his other hand is raking through his hair, his eyes look right through you.  Hanging all your weight on the arm you’re holding on to at least keeps it still and in your grip—you yank on it as hard as you can with all the strength in your newly-formed muscles, and he rolls his shoulders and _growls._ Fuck.  “Listen!  Even if it’s them—even if they’ve _got_ him, they wouldn’t hurt—!”

“Fuck knows what they’ll _FUCKING DO!_ ”  Kurloz is breathing hard and sharp through his teeth—his eyes are wild, he looks more fucking _frightening_ right now than you’ve ever seen him, with all his looming and snarling and confidence, now when he looks scared you can feel an icy prickle up your spine every time he moves, a tightness in your thinkpan like there’s a clamp winding tighter around it.  “It—they—”

And that’s it.  Those are all the words he’s got in him, all of a sudden he’s silent.  The frenzy is still there, the panic, but when he opens his mouth all that comes out are tight, frantic little noises.  He lashes out—a light shatters and he doesn’t seem to care that glass digs at his hands.  His claws drag over the metal wall with an awful, fang-aching scream of friction.  His thorax rumbles and hums with furious, terrified sound, like there’s a thunderstorm trapped inside him. 

For the first time, you look at him and wonder what he looked like at your age.  For the first time, you think about the scared kid he used to be, and think you can see it.  For the first time, for all your scratches at the surface of him, you see him actually really _vulnerable._

You hate it. 

“Go call the empress.”

He growls at you, but you smell the sudden, soft spike, out of place in the terror and confusion, of _want._   The smell of him wanting his palemate is the same as Gamzee, and your stomach pitches and turns inside out and for a second you want to cry. 

“Go.  Call.  The Empress,” you say again instead, and straighten up your jacket.  “Debrief.  She needs to know what’s happening.  And I’ll…” words fail you, for a second.  The enormity of all of this, the emptiness of all the things you don’t know, it’s all so _much._

 _“…_ I’ll get started.”

\--

You run.

You run like a scared wriggler.  You run and shove your family out of your way when they try to stop you, to ask you—it’s all you can do to keep your claws and fangs from them.  It’s all you can do to shake off the pictures of them that stab through you when you see a familiar face, a painted smile.  You see wrists painted red and green.  You see bare heads, they raise their hands to reach for you in worry and you imagine their voices whispering bitter-unwanted blessings and naming you messiah-father—

You know where she has to be and so there you go.

You run.

When you slam through the door Meenah looks up and you don’t know or fucking care what she sees on your face except that she stands up and comes up to you.

“What the fuck?” she asks, and you make noises, panting sounds, high fear-noises.  Animal.  “Okay, okay shhhhh, what the fuck.  Anotter daymare?”

“— _TOOK HIM!”_

It bursts out a harsh snarl, and she grabs hold of you hard as you start to jerk away, move, _fight,_ throw off some of the fire boiling in your flesh—“—took him RIGHT AWAY from MY VERY FRONDS, Meenah, they fucking _stole_ him—”

“Wait,” she says.  “Back up.  Who took who?  _Kurloz._ ” 

But all the sound you can make is a snarl that cracks into a sob, and you fucked up you fucked up you fucked up you FAILED HIM—words don’t come.  Words can’t describe.  You’re old and cold and scarred and battered and you’re on your knees.  You’re brought down.  There’s tears on your painted-on smile.

“…the cult,” she says, and there’s not a doubt in her voice.  “…forreel?  Fuck.  Awww fuck, c’mere.”

You can’t move off your knees.  Can’t hardly hear her.  Can’t see, feel, it’s all your daymares behind your eyes.  Face like yours with wrists painted red and green.  A knife.  A gaping slit in Gamzee’s neck—

“ _Shhh,_ ” she says, and it’s pure pale, no kisses with fangs and tongue, no wandering fronds, just her hands petting your face, your hair.  You snarl and you try to claw her—she won’t let you.  Presses your head up to her cold thorax and you’re so deep in it’s not even a distraction to have her spheres there by your face.  You breathe in her skin and the cold salt smell of her.  “ _Shooooosh.  Kurloz, bayb, you’s fucked_ right _up, aintcha?  Shhhh._ ”

“ _I’m gonna kill_ every fucking one of them,” you say, and for all you feel so weak and shaking, it comes out a snarl like you could tear a thousand worlds to sand.  “If they—if he’s—”

“They ain’t gonna kill him,” she says, and she sounds _so fuckin’ sure_ but the picture won’t go from your eyes that you saw in your dream—how they pulled him apart bit after bit after bleeding bit.

“If he defies,” you say, and it comes out fast and frenzy.  “—if he tells them _no_ , same as me back when—or if he _doesn’t_ , Meenah, if they make him speak their foul lies, if they bend him till he breaks—”

“And which would you rather have?”  she says, and  “If you haddock to pick?  Bleeding or blaspheming?”

You open your mouth on a noise not word or any form of speech at all, long and miserable and furious with agony.  Thinking how it would hurt him to break so—to know himself to have spoken blasphemy like that, that they’d blown up the spark of heresy in him and had him their heretical messiahs’-mouth…but imagining him broken like you dream him, bloody beyond fixing, torn apart at their hungry hands…

Meenah squeezes one horn and the noises you didn’t know you were making cut away in a shaking gasp.

“…saury,” she says, and it hurts the more because you know she means it.  “Not kelping.”  She’s petting your fins and the sides of your neck and up your cheeks and it’s digging down into you insides with wanting, wanting more, wanting closer, wanting her to take what hurts away for a time.  Wanting her to make you easy. 

“… _’s that what you want?_ ” she asks, and you don’t even have the pan power to figure out for real that you said all that out loud.  “ _You want me to take you?  You wanna give yourshellf up?_ ”

“ _Fuck,_ ” is all you can get out to say, but she seems to know what that means, because she leans you forward, leans you up into her till you’re half in her lap.  Her hand’s on your back and side, holds you down to the sure, solid ground.  “ _Meenah._ ”

“I oughta cull you for crawlin’ to me like this,” she says, and you don’t even have it in you for shame.  You’re so fuckin’ scared.  You’re so fuckin’ old, and there’s so goddamn _much_ to fear.  It should happen to you.  It should never touch the one bright, young, sweet thing in your soul, it should never be him… “… _shhh._ We’ll slaughter ‘em, bayb.”

“ _Please_.”

“We’ll take him back,” she says, and her hands are so soft and her voice is sweet.  “… _we’ll stamp them out._ ”


	24. Immortal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some [thematic listening material](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAw-EFuwC3A) for this chapter. UwU
> 
> Also in this chapter, there's a lot of material that I would describe as non-con, although there's no sexual rape, or in fact any quadrant-based rape at all. But there's a lot of well-meaning but extremely unwanted violation of privacy, dignity and personal boundaries, so if that squicks you out be warned.

You wake up, and you don’t know where you are.

That happens sometimes, fuck, you have had such motherfucking _parties_ going on some days—but there’s something about it that wakes you uneasy from the second you take your first woke-up breath in.  Smells wrong, maybe.  There’s a taste in your mouth you don’t recognize—sweet, as sweet as elixir, but spicy-bitter.  It eats at your thinkpan—the taste of it is like a fog over your thoughts, every third word that runs through your thinkpan is thrown off by the _being_ of it there heavy on your elocution flap. 

You’re on soft things.  Pile of stuff under you, smooth on your skin where it touches—shirt off.  Everything feels—wrong.  Not—it just— _wrong._ Try to sit up, but you feel all shivery like all your strength got pulled right the fuck out of you.  Footsteps around.  Voices.  You were going to…see somebody.  Where were you going?  You passed out…?  What the fuck.

“—took the first dose with motherfucking toleration,” says a one, and a hand touches on your face.  You got no fuckin’ clue how you came here, where you are, but that’s not Karkat and you ain’t keen on him touching you, thanks.  You jerk away your head and make a growl to come out. 

“He’s awake!”  Hand moves away.  You get an eye open; bright bright _bright,_ holy fuck, why is everything happening so much?  “Lord?  Lord Makara?  My lord, are you okay?””

“ _Nnnngh,_ ” you say, and gasp in air.  You should be worrying about some shit, something’s going on here but when you started tryin’ to make noises you realized your mouth was _so fuckin’ dry._ God, you’re hungry.  “… _water_.”

Feet going around you.  You start sitting up again, but you got no strength in you.  A hand takes your head and lifts you to put water up to your mouth.  There’s no strength left and the kin giving you drinks doesn’t hold you up far enough but you can’t let them know it and it tastes so fresh and good, so good you drink and drink and drink.  You didn’t know you were so fuckin’ _thirsty_  but god you needed that shit. 

Wakes you up a bit.  You open your eyes a little, little more, and for the first time you get a blurred look on at what’s around.

You’re in a big, wide room.  Cloths all colors around you, painted walls, bright windows, candles maybe—they’re smeared up light around the edges, you can’t make them clear.  Everything’s still painted-rough, big strokes of color, but it’s a church ship, gotta be.  Kin all around you, five maybe, six maybe, faces gray and white in painted mirth.  They’re faces you don’t know.  Paint unfamiliar, not just that you ain’t seen before but…done strange.  Designs you never set ganderbulb on before, and seeing them all painted but in strange ways makes weird fuckery happen in the back of your thinkpan.  You should know something.  Fear is starting to bubble down at the pit of your guts and you don’t quite yet got your figure on of why.

“Lord Makara!”  One of them says again.  All leaning in, and hands touch you real soft around the edges of you.  Shit’s weird.  Something’s wrong.  Why can you not move?  “Oh—sister, you need to turn them on!”

_Jolt_

Hits your whole body, like somebody whacked you across the horns.  You jerk—hands come down on you, not pushing hard, not hurting, just pushing down.  Holding you.  Somebody’s touching your horns.  You snap fangs at them, still getting your eyes to work—some fucker clicks their flap at you like you’re a wriggler and they touch your neck too, hold your head down so the hands can stay poking at your horns. 

“The dampers are working,” says somebody, and you rouse a little more at that, who the fuck and how the fuck many—? The hands go away again and you make to sit up—you get a jerk and a twist, but can’t hardly lift yourself up before you fall back again. “No signature.”

“ _Mmmfffngh,_ ” you say, which is about all as can be expected now you figure.  Shake your head—something’s wrong.  Whatever happened, something’s _wrong._ “—horns—”

“I’m sorry,” a sister says by your head, and she sounds it.  Your horns feel numb and dead.  Makes you dizzy, makes you hurt.  “We know through our contacts they can track your holy chucklevoodoos, lord Makara.  We had to make sure you were safe.”

“… _Krrrrrloz,_ ” you say, half a whimper, and try to open up your eyes all the way again— _fuck_ but it’s bright.  Not-pain takes you again.  “Nnnnhhmajesty—his—”

“Your ancestor.”

Shocks through you, a jolt.  You didn’t know any fucker knew.  You didn’t expect.  “—he’s been turned away,” says a voice, soft and mourning, and a hand lifts up your head and helps a cup to you.  More water.  Cuts through the aching taste clogging you up.  Helps you get sharper.  Think harder.  “He wasn’t a true motherfuckin’ inheritor, your Holy Communion.  He turned his back on the ones he raised, so they turned their backs on him.”  A hand touches you, your lips, the soft flesh at the seam of paint and flesh, and it feels like violation.  In the second it takes you to remember moving, jerking away, they’re gone again.  “—why’d you think that— _foul, blasphemous BITCH_ who slipped poison in your drinks couldn’t do ill on you?  The poison she had a meaning for you to take went to him instead as payment from the messiahs for his fucking— _short-sighted heresy_.”

Hurts, every word like a stab, and not the good way.  Like too much on a body as already took too much.  Hurts in the way missing Kurloz hurt when he went under, when it drove you the fuck outta your pan to know they thought you had hand in it, hurts in a way that ain’t like hurting, ain’t like nothing you could feel with your body, beyond bearing.  And these fuckers, these _harsh UNFUNNY JOKERS,_ they want you to motherfucking believe your _messiahs_ had hand in that?!  FUCK THAT NOISE.

You snarl out long and low and hoarse at them, and they draw back and whisper, and a memory goes cutting through, bright and hard in the fog. 

 _“…flesh,_ ” you say, hoarse and smallest rasp.  “…cult of…flesh.”

More mutters.

“…yes, my lord,” says the one who’s spoken most to you, and they sound all cautious and small and your breathing comes harder, faster, shaky with your fear.  You don’t want these fuckers to know, if Kurloz was here he wouldn’t show—

…if Kurloz was here he’s be fucking terrified.

Knowing that makes it better and worse both together.  You breathe in big gulps, try to keep your face still and blank.  It’s hard.  It’s so fucking hard not to just curl up and hope they leave you alone like a dumb-ass scared-of-the-light wriggler. 

“We are…not many, anymore,” says one, and there’s a slow and sad murmur.  “Twenty maybe, that are truly believers, maybe ten more we might—”

“ _Mind your tongue!_ ”  Older voice, harsher.  The talker stops.  “We waste no more time.  We have none to waste.”  Words are clipped short and sharp, little knives of noises.  Not right, for church. Your eyes blur up and sink closed and itch and ache and you can’t keep them open to get a look at who’s talking.

“…but—brother U—“ a hiss, warning, and they falter again.  Your pan is a dizzy roar.  Fear eats hot at the inside of you.  “—but brother, a little time to rest—to get used to—”

“He has been _unconscious_ for nights straight now acclimatizing to the loading dose, brother,” says the harsh voice, words too hard to understand, too long for your thinkpan right now.  ( _Loading dose?  What the fuck is a_ ) His words warp and bend a moment, your eyes stutter black and blurry.  “ _xxxxnfifsmmzziiia resting_ , wouldn’t you?  Tell him what we need him to look for, and then we’ll do as needs motherfucking must.” 

The brother who was talking at you sighs, mumbles _yes brother_ soft and shamed.  Turns to you and starts again.

 “…we’ll be many again, with your help,” they say, and touch your frond where it shakes unused by you.  “We believe…you can find them for us.  Bring them back.  Speak to them, tell them we need them.”

“…we’ll be _there,_ ” says another, and their voices are rising up now, and you know the sound of belief.  “We’ll be by their sides and _no fucking heretic_ will stand before us.  Not the whole blaspheming mass of them with all their weapons and their ways.  We’ll be invincible.”

Fucking hell they’re all completely pan-cracked.  You open your mouth to let them know so, and think again about the words _speak to them_ and just gape because how the FUCK are you supposed to just shoot the shit with the Messiahs themselves, even these motherfuckers’ _shitty FAKE_ bullshit not-existing _imitations_?

“We have to start as soon as possible,” says another one, and something touches your lips where your mouth hangs slack in shock, all slick and spicy-sweet and you know the taste that was in you when you woke up.  “—they’ll try to stop us.  My lord I need you to open your mouth, a full dose—”

A full dose.  (hot and sweet and burning and your pan won’t lie straight he tolerated the first dose everything so bright and close and it hurts _open your mouth for the full dose—_ )

You been _drugged._

Hot horror goes hissing through your bones, hard and burning, your hate of yourself for shoving poison into you for sweeps, your fear on what it would do to you to start again, you can’t be back on that shit you fucking _can’t—_

“Nnh!”  you say, and jerk your head off their hands, throw yourself away.  They follow, crying out all concern and worry.  “Nnno!  Fuck—I d’n—sopor—”

“It isn’t sopor,” one of them says, and your arms and legs won’t take your weight and you’re being helped back up, back into the softness you were lying on.  More sweet and spicy touches your lips, makes them burn a touch and then ease into soft buzz and hum.  Your skin is alive.  There are colors everywhere.  Why the fuck where you fighting?  What were you…?  “This won’t numb you, my lord, only strengthen your connection.”

“Cnnnnn,” you say.  “C’nnection…?”

You lose their answer.  Your eyes can’t see them anymore.  Your eyes see colors you got no words for.  Your hearing fades out and back, gets only words of what they say.  They want you to speak false on your gods and bring them glory and you’re going to kill them kill them _KILL THEM_ you’re going to cry for a hundred sweeps—

They’re crowding ‘round you close—one of them picks up your hand and you can’t recall how to move so you let them touch it all gentle, trace a finger up to your shoulder where there’s scars, your sign, Kurloz’s—

You sit up fast and hard—try to.  In front of your eyes the changing visions change again, more solid, harder—your eyes burn with how _there_ they are and you think you cry out at it, you feel like you could be fucking _blinded_ with them.  Kurloz, stripped to the waist, thorax all wet and slick from working, snarling out on every breath as he pounds his fists at a training post like it’s a fucker he’d want to fucking beat to death.  Fine points too sharp and real to bear swim past you—every tiniest nick and drop of sweat on one hand, points of blood welling up through his knuckles like sweat—too _there_ , too real, more real than you existing and you see every vessel of his eyes and every lash around them as they turn toward where you aren’t standing, aren’t watching him.  Where are you he asks.  Where           the                                        fuck                                                               are                                                                                         you                                                                                                                ga m  z    e     e      

his voice goes far off and turns into howling and then the awful picture snaps away like a breaking spine and you’re back in yourself, body twisting and shaking and god you’re _screaming,_ your thinkpan fucking _boils._

“ _—contact?”_  people are saying around you, and everything’s grey and fog and at the same time pure blinding white and needles in your ganderbulbs.  It _hurts,_ it hurts in a way that isn’t pain, it’s just _being_ and you can’t fucking _stand it_ , shit is unbearable in every piece of you, every part of you exists and you want it to _STOP—_   “ _—rd Makara?  Be easy—“ “—come around to it—” “—a shock, but—”_

You pull back out again like you’re coming out of deep water, the currents that all but drowned you when you were dumb enough to follow your dad _bleached bones on the beach your old hive abandoned as you scream far away from it in the stars and_ you jerk and open up your eyes again.  Your pusher is going so hard, so fast, you can’t hardly make noises around it as it thunders through your whole body.  You’re worn raw.

“What did you see?”  they’re leaning in around you, hands held up like a couple cold-ass motherfuckers getting their heat on by a fire.  ( _Like a couple worshippers holding hand up to an idol of god—)_   “Did you reach them?  Did they speak to you?”

“ _Kurloz,_ ” you get out, and it’s just like the first time, _just like the first time_ you _useless_ whining piece of SHIT—the dark room flashes past your eyes, the screaming the pain the blood the _fear—_ if there’s one thing you find kinder here it’s that your kin ain’t here, that nobody’s gonna hurt except you…but they _are_ here, and they’re the ones hurting, smiling at you and being kind and telling you it’s worth it and you can feel muscles moving to pump your blood through and the way air opens up your aeration sponges and comes back out of them again and just being and breathing and _living_ is too much too much too much TOO MUCH—

The screaming in your thorax comes out a choked and broken-up little cry, barely a groan.  Somebody has a cold pack and they hold it to your nugbone under your hair, and it just makes everything hurt where it touches you, burns cold like fire off some far-off icy star—you cry again and they take it away, chirring worry and reassuring with hollow-ass words.  It gets its drag back out, the bright dies off so you can breathe again.  But you can feel it gathering up.  Can feel it turn and rush back to you.  You’re going back under and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do to stop it.

“He can’t reach far enough to find them,” a voice says, far off from you and too close and loud both.  The harsh one who had them fucking DO THIS TO YOU.  Hands touch you real gentle.  You whimper like a grub at the bright lights the touches set off behind your eyes.  “Mix another dose.  We can’t leave him trapped in between.”

They’re mixing something.  Wet noises.  Little sounds of stirring against glass are so loud they echo in your skull like ceremony drums, pound through you and _hurt._   They’re making something.  Gonna give you something, more of the sweet-spice burning in your mouth.  You turn your head and you can see them, swimming around like the air’s not sure where it should go.  Four or five in clothes too familiar with faces painted like family, mixing shit up in a glass bowl from little bottles and spoons.

“Wh’sat?”  The words are all broken up, slurring out your mouth.  “W’r you—d-doin’—”

“We call it nectar, your holy communion,” somebody says all quiet, and Kurloz’s face flashes to you again—the curl of his scarred lip, the drip of sweat down his cheek as he walks half-running through the ship’s halls.  As he shakes his head and squeezes shut his ganderflaps like he feels you there, like he can’t bear to look up for you.  “Fact you can take it is just more proof you can do it—you can _see_ them!”  Their voice goes all shaking, sharp, you can seehearsmelltaste them believing in you like it’s pouring out on you, drowning you.  “ _…see the messiahs._ ”

“The _fuck_ —you give me—?”

“Most of the real power of the stuff is what the shitbloods use to push their psionics,” one of them says, like you should feel better for it, and a face with four horns jolts past you—you can see the scars of Sollux’s power burned through his skin and how it takes the lashes off his eyes and how it steams off the pores of his horns.  You see the pupils in his eyes you figured were pupilless—slightest brighter spots in his bright eyes, turning toward right toward you and you are fucking _seen_ and you gasp for air and can’t ever get enough as the picture snaps away again.  “Couple low-grade relaxants—nothing sopor-based, no fear best of brothers—to open your motherfucking mind on up a little.  We got our hands on the blood of lowblood psychics, the most powerful ones we could, to give it shape—”

“… _and the blood of a one who claimed to be a prophet_ ,” somebody says, and red miracle blood is trickling down their fingers, mixing in with their other colors and the foul drugs they’re mixing up.  It’s so bright and strong and true in this dark place and for a second you’re so glad to see it there you could cry.

Then you remember where it must have been got from, and terror takes you like a hand and digs claws into your guts.  Your mouth is stained sugar-spicy and under it all you taste the sharp metal taste of sweet blood, thick on your tongue.

“ _Karkat,_ ” you say, and roll on your side and gag and scream and cry and when the black slams into your thinkpan even passing the fuck out is too much to bear.

\--

“I thought he was there,” says Kurloz, and punches the wall—sharp jabs, like he can’t stand to stand still for more than a second.  His hands are already bandaged, the hair around his temples is soaked in sweat.  His paint is smeared around his mouth, nose and his wide, mad eyes.  He looks totally fucking insane.  “I _felt_ him there.  He was _hurting._ ”

You’re sitting in an empty debriefing block near the top of the ship—you were practicing with your sickles, trying to burn off some of the anxiety, when Kurloz came stomping in covered in sweat, half-naked and bleeding from the knuckles, and pulled you off to an empty room to tell you he _felt Gamzee._   That he _just knew._  

You’ve barely slept since you pupated, with all the testing and poking and stress and things to catch up on, and this musclebeast shit is wearing really thin on your strained thinkpan.  You aren’t going to crack though.  You _can’t fucking_ afford to crack.  Not with Gamzee not here, not with Kurloz almost fucking paralyzed by his hate and fear.  You cross your arms and watch him punch the wall, bristling with nervous energy, lean muscles flexing and bunching as he lays into the metal like the impacts don’t even ache.

“If you’re picking up his chucklevoodoos—”

“We scanned but they shut those down, wasn’t them.”  He turns away like he’s going to look at you—he manages to stand still for all of five seconds before he’s pacing off across the room to lay into the other wall.  “Fucking—he’s got no powers in his pan beyond what I got, wasn’t him.”

“You said—”

“I know what I FUCKING SAID!”  He wheels around again, and his face is twisted into a snarl.  “I know it was him and I know it fucking wasn’t, but one of those is what’s right and one’s wrong, and of the two I got full knowing on of which makes sense!  Fuck!”

“You need to calm the fuck down,” you snap, and he growls and in the silence as he opens his mouth, your palmhusk chimes.

You pick it up, bewildered, and see a username you haven’t seen in sweeps.

twinArmageddons [TA] started trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]

TA: hey kk, 2o uh.

TA: what2 up wiith you and GZ the2e niight2?

Your heartbeat redoubles.  This can’t be coincidence, it fucking _can’t._   You tap out a message, heart pounding, and Kurloz stalks over and stares over your shoulder—you feel him go stiff and still.

CG: WHY?

CG: HELLO TO YOU TOO, BY THE WAY, SO NICE TO TALK AGAIN AFTER ALL THIS FUCKING TIME, ALL THAT SCHLOCK.

TA: yeah yeah you’re really funny and whatever.

TA: 2eriiou2ly though, what’2 up wiith GZ.

CG: WHY SHOULD ANYTHING BE QUOTE-UNQUOTE “UP” WITH HIM?

He takes a long minute to answer back.  You stare at your screen, barely breathing.

TA:  ii

TA: ii2n’t he

TA: ii thought ii heard

TA: what the FUCK.

CG: I DON’T KNOW. 

CG: IF THIS HAPPENS AGAIN, MESSAGE ME **IMMEDIATELY**, THAT’S AN ORDER.

CG: I’LL LET YOU KNOW IF WE FIGURE ANYTHING OUT.

You drop the palmhusk on the desk and look up at Kurloz, and he looks back at you and for the first time since you got that final message, there’s a spark of something beyond frenzy and stress in his eyes. Something sharp, something _hungry_.  You can feel it reflected in yours.  This is barely anything, but it _is_ fucking _something_. 

It’s somewhere to start.

\--

You don’t wake, so much as drift.  Everything hurts, everything is beyond bearing.  You breathe, and it’s so much it makes you sink back into the black.

You wake again, and it’s fading.  You can’t open your eyes, can’t feel your body anymore beyond a numb, cold weight you’re bound to—messiahs alone got the means to figure how long you been out, but praise, fucking _praise,_ it has lessened. 

The lessening goes on, for a time motherfucking uncountable.  You stop seeing things behind and around your eyes, things that are so fucking close and real you can’t bear to look.  Start to finally see nothing but black in your thinksponge again.  For a time and a half maybe, you have something that feels like dreams, real enough to make out the every fucking detail but not cruel and hot and sharp.  Not like they were. 

Your mind roams to Terezi, and you walk past her in a tiny, grey block with papers on the walls and posters of trolls wanted for culling.  She looks up as you look at her, drifting on by—sniffs the air and frowns, but then you’re pulled soft away again.  Trying to pick a thought to go visiting to on purpose makes you want to die—you can’t make thoughts still, like your whole thinkpan is something torn and aching.  Your thoughts go from one color to another, slow and slick.  Vriska drops her sword and turns her eyes straight to you, and her mouth goes open and angry, puts fear through you like a blade in the guts.  You pull away from that thought, and just pushing yourself as far as that makes everything go black again for a bit. 

More dreams, fainter.  Fragments.  Feeder Travye paces his block, and looks up surprised as his moirail says something, reaches out her hands for him.  He pauses.  Frowns, looks back, and you’re gone.  Other kin, with faces familiar to you and faces you barely know.  You see bare skin left unpainted in private blocks and you’re too stripped raw yourself in your thinkpan to know why you should feel shame at the sight of them.  You see gentle gold-brown eyes and promise yourself with slow, dragging thoughts if you get away alive out of this you’ll talk to Tavros again some time.  He was your good bro and he was fucking great to talk to.  The hazy wriggler wanting for him don’t present itself at this point, but you don’t have to be all swooning at a motherfucker to like him, and like him you did.

If you live, you promise yourself and your messiahs, and watch your friends flash by you, bright and close like you could touch them.  (Someone touches you, far away, hot, sweet burning spills fresh into your mouth and burns your insides up like harsh sunlight)  _If you live_.

\--

GC: K4RK4T WHY 1SN’T G4MZ33 4NSW3R1NG MY M3SS4G3S? >:?

CG: BETTER QUESTION: WHY ARE YOU MESSAGING GAMZEE?

GC: K4RK4T, YOU WOUND M3.

GC: 1 W4S JUST CH3CK1NG UP ON 4 FR13ND!

CG: YOU NEVER CHECK UP ON GAMZEE.

CG: WHAT, DID YOU “HAVE A BAD FEELING”?

GC: 4 GOOD L3G1SL4C3R4TOR MUST TRUST H3R 1NST1NCTS, K4RK4T.

CG: SO YOU **DID**!!

GC: K4RK4T, WH4T 1S GO1NG ON. >:?

CG: I DON’T FUCKING KNOW, OKAY.

CG: BUT YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO’S BEEN THINKING ABOUT HIM FOR NO REASON TODAY.

GC: HOW M4NY OTH3RS?

CG: SOLLUX JUST MESSAGED ME ABOUT GAMZEE TOO, I HAVEN’T TALKED TO HIM IN PERIGEES.

CG: GAMZEE'S MATESPRIT TOO, AND HE’S NOT THE TYPE TO JUMP TO IRRATIONAL CONCLUSIONS WHATEVER’S GOING ON WITH HIS QUADRANTS.

CG: I MEAN IT COULD BE A COINCIDENCE, I’M NOT SAYING IT’S A LEAD OR ANYTHING.

GC: TH3R3’S NO SUCH TH1NG 4S CO1NC1D3NC3, K4RK4T.

GC: TH1S SOUNDS 1NTR1GU1NG S1TU4T1ON YOU’V3 GOTT3N YOURS3LF 1NTO.

GC: T3LL M3 MOR3.

Kurloz makes a growling, grumbling noise behind you—when you glance back and up he’s frowning, considering.

“She’s…good at what she does,” you point out.  “I’d rather have her on our side.”

He scowls.  “…fuckin’ teals,” he says, like that’s all he needs to say. 

“Oh, you pick _now_ to bring your massively overblown casteist douchbaggery back into the equation?”  You elbow him away.  “I’m bringing her in.”

He shoves at you—you shove back, and as you’re just about to turn around and make it a real fight, your palmhusk beeps again.  You grab it, expecting to see a teal >:? On your screen, but instead there’s a _NEW CONVERSATION_ notice blinking at the corner of the screen.

CG: I’LL TELL YOU, BUT ONLY IN PERSON.

GC: F4SC1N4T1NG.  1T’S 4 D34L. >:]

  ...Now.  Who the fuck…  
  


arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]

AG: Kark8t, tell your scrawny f8cked-up moirail to GET 8 OF MY P8N!!!!!!!!

CG: WAIT, YOU FELT HIM TOO?!

[AG] has blocked [CG]

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara.

You think.

You think your.

Name

think your name is ga                akara your nam

it hurts

 

 

You fade back in to the inside of your thinkpan like waves on your beach back home.  A motherfucker doesn’t hardly have the words for how your body feels—“sore” can’t even start to cover that shit.  You’re just barely awake and all you can feel is how fucking _hungry_ you are, how thirsty, how every bit of you feels used and burns when it’s made to move.

You can’t move to do shit-all about it though, so you just lie still and quiet instead, and breathe.  Your aerations sponges feel over-stretched and your choke is sore like you’ve screamed the whole time you were under.  You’re trembling, on and off.  Not strong enough to just shake and shake, you don’t have it in you.  Fades in and out with your breaths.

You’re still lying, breathing, shaking, when they come back for you.

“Lord Makara,” they say, hushed and gentle-like at you, and you make a fucking terrible little grub-sound and try to curl up away from them.  Moving lights you up hot and straining-sore all over. There’s chains on your fronds.  When did those get put there?  How long did you sleep here?  God it hurts, hurts in a way you never felt before, hurts like you think hurting must be for others, not a pleasure but a terrible fucking curse.  Can’t bear it, can’t fucking _stand it—_ “You did such a great motherfuckin’ job, lord.  We….”

They fade out as your eyes slide shut, and you’re so fucking scared and it hurts too bad and you lose seconds as your thinkpan tries to break away from it, tries to pass out again but can’t.

“—for the strain on your body,” somebody finishes, and a cup touches your mouth, all full with cold water.  It’s not a choice, you can’t even _think_ about motherfucking refusing.  You drink it down, and four more like it, till you feel you’re bursting and some of the dry ache goes from your mouth.  Something else, touching your mouth for you to take—hot, now.  Fresh meat, fried up and tender still and the best thing you’ve eaten in your _whole goddamn life._   Every bit of you that you make to move fights you, but hungry as you are you don’t care, and you eat till you think you’ll puke if you eat more.  They wipe up your face—you breathe out small and terrible noises to try to tell them _no, stop,_ as they lay you bare in front of god knows who the fuck all, but they don’t listen, just pull out soft brushes and make new paint for you in shapes you don’t know.  They reach down to the chains on your hands and put soft cloth around their edges, lay you up a little so you ain’t hunched down, so breathing comes easier. 

One of them is humming, old hymns you know so fucking well, and it’s hard to recall, to remember why you’re so scared, why everything hurts—the caring-for feels so nice.  “ _These are just to keep you from hurting yourself during communion,_ ” that one murmurs at you real soft, and eases the cuff up from where it pushed at the knob of bone at the base of your hand, strokes their fingers real soft over the sore place it rubbed.  “We’ll take them off as soon as we know you won’t hurt yourself.  There.” 

The voices drift off somewhere else again, like they’re talking a ways away where you can’t hear.  Your eyes are shut still, and the dark is so fucking nice.  Maybe if you sleep everything will stop _being_ so much, maybe you’ll stop feeling every bit of yourself as an ache and not as sick from eating and drinking so much so fast.  Maybe if you sleep you’ll wake up next to the ones you love and they’ll kiss your hair and face and horns and make you feel good to be, like they always do.  Maybe if you sleep…

You’re just drifting away again when your mouth fills up with the taste of metal and spice and sweet sugar.  Every bit of you slams up against the cuffs on your fronds—you start to spit and choke and struggle and you know the taste and you can almost feel it setting into you again.  Your eyes snap open wide and scared, and the faces above you are worried but happy for you and gentle and too bright, brighter and clearer and closer like some fucker’s cranking a knob in your head.  You thought you felt everything more than enough before but you were fucking wrong and it comes back into you in shards of feelings like glass in your flesh, so sharp and bright in every part of you.  It comes out of your mouth pathetic and awful and wrigglerish _no I can’t I can’t d’n make me please don’t please don’t please don’t no no no_ no _—_ pleading, breaking-up sobs.  For a second your eyes are open and you see them and you see the lust of believing inside them, going through you like knives.  Then you’re screaming, and then you’re gone.

 

 

the cold again wiping the sweat off your

_the empress is sitting up in her block with your moirail next to her, talking with words that don’t quite reach karkat’s crying karkat’s crying karkat’s crying karkat_

touch makes overflow overflow makes pain pain makes pleasure and pleasure makes your world go

_kurloz dreams and snarls in his sleep and he’s twisted with it, warped around, his face is wet and his back bends under his daymares_

darkened and the room’s window looks out on stars when the cloth is pulled back by

_not much of a light but his eyes light up the air around him red and blue and he_

maybe, or maybe you’re just imagining the pleasure you should feel from so much fucking PAIN but even just the echo of it’s too much to

 _is talking to a group of kin with faces so knowing-hungry like his, asking for answers, asking for_ you _you know he’s asking after you_

the icy ache of your fingertips

_tiniest lines at the corners of Kurloz’s mouth where he’s smiled for hundreds of_

numb pounding at the back and bottom of your thinkpan like somebody knocking over and over and over and over and

_six sharp eyes in one and the pupils there are tiny like needle holes as she looks at you and her pan starts to reach for_

on your skin where you should be covered it’s too much and it hurts and

_knuckles where he’s been digging his teeth in, just the tiniest scars all red like his_

You almost wake up once, in the dark, with the cloth all pulled back to see the stars.  You feel your body, still and unused and aching.  Someone is touching you gentle—your skin is bare and hands slip over it and touch you like you’re a piece of glass.  Feels like too much.  Hisses and burns in your thoracic struts like they’re carving your bones out of you.  There’s lips kissing your scars.  Sighs and soft purrs.  Fingers through your hair.  Voices reading words you don’t know.  Cold metal and cold hands sliding up and down your deadened horns.  Heavy things that shine and clink as they slide around your neck. 

You think maybe you feel a hand ease careful down the line of your hip to the ridge of tiny half- fin to find the stud through it, but there’s no way of knowing for sure because just then hands touch your gills and the feeling of it sends you under again.

\--

Your name is Kurloz Makara, and you don’t know you’re dreaming yet.

You always find out in the end, when what your pan throws up gets too much and too hurting to be real, but there’s something about The Cult that turns your pan into ice. 

Gamzee lies back on the altar, chained spread out.  There’s green trickling from his mouth and nose and hands where he tried to push them off.  You thought it was blood, but it’s slime.  Sweet-bitter poison-slick slime, all down his chin and neck where they fed him bite after bite.  He lolls undone now, like how you found him before you made him quit; so doped he can’t hardly move. 

They gather around him with knives, and he shakes.

“ _…nnnh,_ ” he says, so soft and shook up, he _can’t talk_ and he can’t tell them straight and they’re not _listening_ to him, they don’t know or don’t care that he’s shaking his head and groaning denials and pleas.  He gasps as they start to cut into him, deep and steady and careful, taking him apart like meat slaughtered.  Faceless kin steal bits of him and fight over them, hissing for a _holy relic_ of the new Immortal.  His bones are growled and snapped over.  You know who they’re saving his pusher for.

He comes apart too easy, a bit at a time, and by the time they’re half the way through he’s crying, shaking with how good he feels and how he doesn’t _want_ the good feeling, begging them they’ll send you instead, begging them he’s yours and they shouldn’t do this, he doesn’t want them to do this please please he needs to come but not by them please let him have Kurloz before they kill him.

You’re bound and fettered and motherfucking _gagged_.  There’s no ropes on you, nothing chokes your voice, but still you stand frozen and dumb.  He can’t see you there just out of reach, still where you stand, watching him cry for you and beg them not to be so cruel as to make him come for them, not like this, _not for them_.  To please not kill him like this.  He needs to see you.  He needs to say goodbye, please let him say goodbye to Kurloz please he’ll give them anything—your eyes are hot, but you can’t tell if it’s red fury or burning tears that makes them that way.  He’s crying.  You want to die.

You don’t know what changes but you’re moving again.  You can’t run to him like you want to, but you can walk and stand over him and your hand reaches out and touches his thorax right where his pusher pounds fast and scared under his skin.  Gamzee turns his face up to you and he’s crying, he is so afraid and you walked to him but you can’t remember how to do fuck-all else, can’t fight away the pieces of filth hunched over him, can’t pick him up and promise you’ll fix what they did, can’t can’t _can’t_.  He’s so small.  When did they bare his face? 

“ _Please,_ ” he says, and he looks right through you with eyes pleading hopeless for an end.  “… _K…loz…Immortal…please…_ ”

You wake up howling and thrashing with your own claws dug in your thorax like you’re trying to tear yourself in halves.  Like _he’s_ there in you and you have to pull him out.  You’re not in your slime—you’re sitting up, there’s papers shredded in front of you where you raked your claws at the wood.  And you take one, two, three great, gasping breaths, and then let it out in a single sound, one great, shaking sound, all the pain and fear tearing out into the air in a howl that rings through the block.  Your claws dig at your arms, your thorax, your face—blood, pain hot in your skin, and it’s all the pain you can’t give him, all the pain some other heinous damned _fucker_ might be forcing on him awhile you sit on your ass and sleep instead of working and it’s _not enough._   You claw and make noise, frenzy and fury, slam at walls, rip your lip open on your fangs and your knuckles open on metal, hate and _hate_ and _HATE—_

You turn, and Karkat stands pressed flat against the wall, watching you with sickles pulled.  He doesn’t breathe.  His eyes are wide and watchful and hurting and _scared._   And you stand, covered in blood and breathing in great rasps, shaking like you’re dying from the cold, and you have no words to say to him.  Your pusher flutters for a couple long seconds, beats hard and light and fast so you can’t breathe and your seeing fades in and out.

“…bad dream?” Karkat says, in the echoing quiet, and his voice is trying so hard for casual and coming out so badly shaken you could almost laugh.  You don’t.  He wants you to answer in words, play it down, but you can still see Gamzee laid out bleeding, begging for you and getting only _him_ instead.  You pant and every place you clawed yourself _burns_ and you haven’t got words.  You can’t remember how. 

Vantas lowers his fronds, real slow.  Puts his sickles away, one at a time, watching you.  Your eyes still burn red with hate.  Everything behind them is empty-cold as the breathless places between stars. 

“Sit down,” he says, quiet and calm, and he reaches out for you.  You won’t be _soothed_ by him, fuck that noise.  You growl and he growls back a little and that’s not nearly pale like you expected.  You stop and frown and your pan slowly starts to grind back into moving.  “Sit.  _Down._  Before I have to watch you fall down.”

Still no words. You shake your head.  He growls.  Shake your head again.  He reaches out like he’s putting a hand on you and you pull away from it. 

“You think I’m flipping on you,” he says, and he sounds like that’s just the most dumb-ass bullshit he ever heard you think when he _stands there_ with his hands reached out for you and his eyes so sharp on you and you know you’re making a goddamn scene, you could be any highblood in any filthy piece of dirtblood diamond porn, shaking and red-eyed and panting for a hand to calm them.  When he comes near you you growl.

“You think I’m _pale_ for you right now?”

You meet his eyes.  _You know what I think._

He steps in close, leans up to you, narrows his eyes and bares all his white fangs in your face.

“ _Fuck.  You._ ”

He reaches out again and it’s faster this time, he’s not hesitating, and you jerk but he has a hand full of your hair and you ain’t exactly top of your fight right now.  Keeps pulling himself up to you, closer, face to face with you, breathing your air and the growl winding out of you tight and angry. 

“You are so fucking— _archaic_ , the way you handle your quadrants sometimes!”  He shoves forward, and you’re snapped a little out of the red and black fog with the way he makes your back prickle, your teeth bare.  “You think I don’t give a fuck about what goes on in your tiny oozy excuse for a thinkpan just because you’re a loathsome piece of shit?  You can’t even conceptualize that I can interact with you without sucking you off or hurting you somehow, can you?  God, just because I go five seconds without insulting you that doesn’t mean I’m blurring quadrants at you, you perverted freak of nature, settle your boney ass _down_!”

Blinds you a second.  Leaves you blinking.  He pushes up into your arms and they come up—to squeeze, to claw, to strangle, but all you do is knead your claws at his back.  Threaten with them like you can tell him _if you’re not pale then fuck off before I tear you open—_ he don’t listen.

“It’s a good thing you’re so capable,” he says, mild, mocking-calm, and scrubs off a cut on your shoulder with his sleeve, not gentle like a palemate taking care but rough and sharp, careless of the sting.  You hiss through your teeth at the pain, and watch his face.  “—there.  It’s a good thing you’re capable, and you work hard, because you’re an insufferable ass to everybody.  Have you ever sat down and actually _thought_ about that, in that rattled excuse for a thinkpan?  You don’t even have the basic sense to treat castes _above_ yours with respect.  You’ve been around so goddamn long and you still don’t even know how quadrants work?  You don’t have an excuse, fucking hell.  Dumbass.”

“ _Kkhhhhnnn,_ ” you get out, and the words grind and fight and struggle away from you when you try to talk.  “… _fff._ ”

“Not Alternian yet,” he says, mocking, “—try harder.”

Oh _FUCK HIM._ “—ffffFUCK you!”

Finally, goddammit.  If there was a one motherfucker you never wanted to see you when your words broke, it’s this globesy little piece of shit. 

He’s grinning at you. 

“… _he’s all alone.”_

You don’t mean the words to come out, but it itches and aches at you.  He’s watching you, and there’s no softness in his face.  No pity, just cool, still watching.

“I know,” he says.  “And you’re—”  for a second you think he’ll say _scared_ , and you’re set to _rip his fucking head off_ for it because you can hear it from Gamzee, but from him, never.  Not from him.  “—worried.  I’m worried too, okay?  Fuck.  If you weren’t worried I’d want to know why.”

“ _They’ll kill him._ ”

“They’ll keep him alive as long as they can.”

Alive to torment, alive to batter at and try to bend him.  Alive and hurting.  It’s not a comfort and you know when you meet his eyes he knows.  That he’s not comforted more than you are.  He cocks his head on one side.  Looks at you. 

You don’t know, quite, how that look is supposed to take you.  How you should find out the feelings going on in your pusher, all twisted up in knots.  _Don’t hate yourself,_ it seems to say, and he threads a handful of your hair and pulls back until you growl, raw and shaky.  _Hate me.  Only ever me. Don’t you fucking dare._ You hate him.  You do fucking _despise._   Now in the dark and quiet, how you feel for him takes you like you ate the fucking _sun._

“…you need something to squeeze?”

Now he is going too far.  Rage spits you up out of the deep dark place where your daymares live.  “How the _fuck_ you call this _not pale_?” you hiss at him, but he don’t flinch.  “How the fuck, Vantas?!”

“Because sometimes after the kind of fucked up daymare you get from slogging through sweeps and sweeps of surviving every shitty thing life can throw at you, you need something to hold on to,” he says, and there’s no fake fronting to the way he meets your ganderbulbs with his.  He’s serious.  100 fucking percent.  “The fact that you drive me up the goddamn wall doesn’t mean I’m not small and tough and apparently, according to Gamzee, good for squeezing after daymares.”  He raises his chin, and there’s that misplaced pride, that endless well of fighting, fucking _hubris_ that makes pitch hate throb through you.  “Limited-time offer, shitglobes.”

You sit and stare and he rolls his eyes like you’re fucking something up and shoves even closer, heedless whole and entire of the way your thorax still bubbles up growls and your claws shake and drip your own blood to the floor.  He shoulders up against you, _puts his back to you_ if you’ll believe that, shoves his head back against your neck and crosses his arms and it’s not hardly a choice the way your fronds rise up, shaking, and wrap around him to squeeze that hot, tough little body closer.

He’s right, fuck him.  He’s right, and you needed to hold him close now, and it _doesn’t_ feel fucking _pale_ even where some bit in your thinkpan tells at you it should.  Feels pitch, still.  Feels good.  He’s hot like a heat pack, solid but not hard and all edges like you know you are sometimes—soft bounce-tissue over hard muscle.  Small and hot and unbreakable and _present_ and hateable and everything you needed right now.  You put your face in his hair, just so your fangs barely skim the base of his horn, and breathe as he twitches against the touch, and just fucking— _hold on._

Takes you a long time to pull away.  A time or two you squeeze hard enough to make him flinch, but he doesn’t pull away. 

“… _doesn’t change_ shit, _”_ you say, hoarse and broken-up, and loose your grip a little.  You don’t let go of him.  He’s warm against your thorax.  “ _Changes fuck-all._ ”

“Yeah,” he says.  “Because palemates are the only people ever allowed to do anything even a little bit soothing, ever.  At all.  The only way this is going to be weird is if you make it weird, pervert.”

“Freak.”

“Shitlord.” 

“Midget.”

“Chute-licker.”  He pulls out his palmhusk.  “…Terezi got me thinking—I’ve been talking to some of my friends from back on the planet.  There’s one or two who I think might be useful…”

You listen to him talk, and squeeze him hard, and think about spies and hints and whispers, and wonder.

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and there is no way this is a coincidence.

The reports don’t stop coming.  Everybody who was ever on your trollian contact list back on the home planet messages either you or Gamzee’s abandoned husktop over the next couple of days—too many, _way_ too many to be a coincidence. Kurloz brings back more reports—clowns bringing news that they “felt the spirit of their brother” near them.  What the _fuck_ is going on.

“It was him,” Kurloz says, terse and tense, and pitches a club up into the air.  It spins in the air and then drops again.  It’s hypnotic watching it.  “…there’s no fucking with that.  Not with so many.”

“Mm.”  It’s the same conversation you’ve had before.  “I think we can agree those messages you got while you were off-ship _weren’t_ him though—they must have wanted to keep you from rushing to come back.  They were stalling.  When you got back they knew you would notice he was gone, so it didn’t matter.”

“…yeah.”  Rise and fall.  Rise and fall.  You imagine some faceless shitheel with Gamzee’s palmhusk in hand, pretending to be him, and your shoulders tense with snarls.  Using it and destroying it like—like they’re going to do to—

You flinch from that thought, and for the first time something occurs to you. 

“…why would they tip you off it was them though?” 

You glance over at him—he meets your eyes for a split second and then his eyes dart away.  You know that look.  You’ve seen it on Gamzee a hundred times.

“Tell me.”

He chews on his tongue.  You can almost see it in his eyes, his face, the set of his shoulders, _I was hoping that little fucker wouldn’t ask about that._

“…well?”

“—picture they took,” he says, harsh and fast.  “They wanted my face when I found out.”

“What?”  You almost laugh, but he looks deadly serious.  “I know you think pretty highly of yourself, fucklord, but I don’t think they’d tip you off just for the sake of—”

“Then you didn’t fucking _pay attention_ ,” he snarls.  “They _hate_ me, Vantas.  They got a burning _hate_ at me for what I did to them last time.  I’m everything they want dead about the church.”

“The _anti-messiah_ ,” you say, half-joking, but he just looks at you, perfectly even and deadly cold, and your smile falls.  “…seriously?”

“I got a good testimony of what they want last time,” he says.  “They turned on me before they died.  Told me I was damned.  They’d survive what I did to their bodies, they told me.”  His hands move slowly—the only part of him that moves.  One claw tracing along the lines of his other hand, over and over.  “…their ghosts would be on my back,” he says, quieter and farther away.  “…and the cult would come back in body too one day—find me and take me and break me and show my brokenness off to the whole motherfucking galaxy and paint their new chapel in my blood.  And when the _true immortal_ came reborn, his throne would be my bones—my horns they’d carve up for a crown—” 

His eyes are far away, his voice is almost sing-song—like he’s repeating something he heard sweep and sweeps ago.  You watch, weirdly breathless, frozen in place.  The air hums and throbs.  Are you imagining the flicker of bright purple in his eyes?

“…if they think him a blasphemer,” he says, slow and quiet, so even.  “…if they get in their pans that he can’t be bent to them, that his faith is true as I _fucking well know it is_ —that’ll be him.”

“They…want you that bad?”

“They want him more.”  He slumps forward—rakes his fingers through his hair.  “…I’d say we lure them out with me, but—”

“ _No._ ”  He jumps, brows knitting at the sharpness of your tone—okay yes that kind of sounded like a lusus scolding a disobedient wriggler.  “Are you an idiot?  Holy shit, of course we can’t use you as bait.  You’re the fucking _Grand Highblood_ , get some perspective, holy shit.”

“If it got him back—“

“We _can’t afford to use you as bait,_ ” you say, and you know he understands but he still scowls at you, rebellious.  “You’re too valuable.”

“He’s the most—” he starts, and stops.  Closes his eyes.  His lips thin as his common sense, his experience, his knowledge of his own worth, fight with… _Gamzee._   Your precious, stupid, wonderful idiot god if he doesn’t survive you are going to _kill_ him. 

“…besides,” you say, and he blinks out of the internal struggle and looks up at you instead.  There’s something almost wary about the look in his eyes.  “…if they get you, what do they do?  What are we supposed to do?  Even if we got him back and you got captured, he would go straight back in after you.  He would _tear himself apart_ to get back to you.  And in the meantime, you shit-panned fucker, god knows what they would be doing to you and probably broadcasting to the entire empire.”  ( _take me and break me and show my brokenness off to the galaxy…)_   The idea of the things they would have to do to him to bring him down to that level, it sends a cold thrill up and down your spine. 

He doesn’t say “I know” but you can see it in his face.  It would rankle his pride too badly to admit your argument makes sense.

“…I’m going back to the Condescension,” you say, and stand up.  “I have things I need to get from my block if I’m going to be here for long.  People I need to talk to on the not-a-honking-lunatic end.”

“Yeah,” he says, and starts to shift himself, to stand as well.  “Me and Meenah got things to—”

“No,” you say.  “ _I’m_ going back to the Condescension.  You’re going to stay here and work your ship for information.  I—can’t.”  it burns to admit it, but you both know it’s true so there’s no point pretending it’s not.  “They won’t talk to me.  But you know people.  And the people you know also know people.  Use that.  Find out where Gamzee was the last time he was seen, at least.”

He sighs out a growl and sits back.  “…fuck you,” he says, late and quiet, and you know you’ve won this one.  “Don’t dawdle, little fucker.  There’s work yet for doing.”

You wave him off and stand up, stretching out your back.  You’ve been back and forth to the Condescension and the Dark Carnival so many times, even hurtling through space in a little lump of metal is starting to be boring.  It’s several hours at least to get from one to the other usually.  You better get started now.

A hand grabs your wrist.

“Vantas,” he says, and you don’t turn around because you don’t want to see the look on his face.  “Karkat.  Don’t do anything fucking _stupid._ ”

 _If you vanish too I’m gonna flip my shit,_ you translate in your head, and jerk your hand sharply into the weak point of his grip, twisting out of his hold. 

“You just worry about yourself,” you say, and pat yourself down, straightening your uniform.  “Get to work.  I’ll be back later.”

\--

The _Condescension_ is huge, and the loading bays are down at the very bottom and the Condesce’s blocks are right up at the top, so when you pull in in your shuttle, tired and groggy despite the nap you had on the trip over, you have a hike ahead of you. 

A few people stop to greet you—the higher on the hemospectrum, the more passive-aggressive the greeting.  One or two of your flaysquad run into you when you reach the midblood decks, and you get what looks like one or two genuine smiles from them and a couple of sharp salutes.  Freak and mutant you may be, but you think your squad likes you okay.  Even if you’re gone on non-threshecutioner business a lot of the time.  You salute back sharply and they grin and wave you off like…well, kind of like friends. 

You’re still not sure how to feel about being a leader.  You’re starting to think it isn’t anything like what you imagined when you were a wriggler. 

The higher you go on the ship the less friendly the faces get.  You’re just navigating through the tricky, dark corridors of the blueblood nobles, heading towards _yet another_ flight of stairs with fuschia trident-shaped signposts at the top and bottom ( _Quadrant blocks, counshell blocks, back down, more glubbin stairs, engineeling_ ) when you see a familiar figure coming the other way down the long, thin hallway.

Oh great.  _This_ asshole.  What a tool.

He’s one of the Condesce’s lower echelon of councilors, and a pretty favored noble—not nearly the highest position you could get in the empire, but pretty up there.  You’ve seen him around before—he’s…average, in most ways.  Big, sharp, hooked nose, strong cheekbones.  The only really interesting thing about his face at all is his eyes, which are freakishly sharp and vivid and make you feel like you’re being stabbed when he looks at you, which he likes to use to his advantage when petty decisions that don’t involve the Condesce come to a staredown between her councilors.  He’s bitchy and stubborn and shrewd and lower-blooded than the rest of the trolls around him, so theoretically you should have some things in common with him and maybe have a grudging respect for each other.

That didn’t happen somehow.  Instead you just kind of want to gut him whenever he opens his mouth.

…it didn’t occur to you until now, coming off the church fleet into the weirdly sterile atmosphere of even the blueblood decks, to wonder why he doesn’t paint his face.  You never thought of him as a purpleblood.

“Oh,” he says, cold and clipped.  It’s the first time you’ve talked to him one-on-one without the buzz of a party behind both of your voices—it jolts you weirdly to hear the same faint humming resonance to his voice as the empress.  As the clowns you’ve talked to with those fake, useless half-gills.  His voice says _clown_ to you, but he has none of the lilt and accent of somebody who grew up in the church fleet.  It feels…wrong.  Like seeing one of the clowns without all that waxy bullshit smeared on their face.

“Threshecutioner,” says the Uumbrage, blank and neutral to a fault.  His eyes are like stone.  “Good afternoon.”

“Sure,” you say, purposely casual and dismissive, and his eyebrows twitch ever-so-slightly.  Fuck, you don’t feel up to the political games tonight.  Talking to nobles and advisors is like the world’s most boring, infuriating wriggler argument in the world.  Every word you have to calculate to get what you want, and in this asshole’s case what he wants is to know what makes you upset and repeat it as much as possible.  You know who he is.  You’ve read up on him, how he goads people into sweeps and sweeps of bitter escalation.  Everyone he’s gone after that way has ended up discredited and disgraced at best, dead at worst.  Apparently you’re his new target.

That’s okay.  You have experience fighting things bigger than you.

“Terse today, aren’t you?”  he observes blithely.  “If I actually believed you were capable of maintaining a functional relationship, I would tell you to pay your moirail a visit.  But…” he yawns.  “…I still think you’re lying about…’him’, wasn’t it?  No…” he looks you up and down, and his lips curls a little.  “…you don’t have a moirail.”

Your neck prickles with rage.

“ _My_ _moirail_ is on another ship,” you say, as clear and dignified as you know how.  “Unlike your quadrants, which everyone know you keep locked up in your blocks and only let out under your supervision.”

His mouth quirks slightly.  “Did I touch a nerve?”  he doesn’t wait for an answer.  “—they’re only slightly higher in standing on the spectrum than you, they’re hardly capable of functioning on their own in civilized society.”  His eyes meet yours.  _And you’re even lower,_ they say.  _You can’t function here at all,_ shitblood.

“I don’t have time to fix your reprehensible bullshit relationships for you, Uumbrage,” you say dismissively, and his eyebrow twitches ever so slightly.  “I have business to deal with.”

He steps aside for you.  For a second you’re caught off guard—didn’t expect it to be that easy—and then you stride past him and don’t look back.

You can feel him watching you as you walk away, and his voice pounds in your head.  _You don’t have a moirail._ For just a second, you feel like you could turn around and see Gamzee there.  Like now, when you need him so much, he would just appear.

You walk faster.

\--

You drift away as Karkat walks off from you fast and sharp and not looking back at you. You feel all wet, cold, like they washed you off while you were out—your wrists hurt like _fuck_.  Must’ve struggled more this time.

Somebody is there with you and you don’t— _don’t_ —want their hands on you again, don’t want them talking to you all soft and poison like they do when they know you’re awake.  You keep your eyes shut and your mouth hung open, all dry and lips cracked.  Your breathing goes tight in and out.  Rattle and rattle and wheeze.  Don’t know if you could talk just now if you tried.

“ _Fierce were their hands, with claws and godly might,_ ” somebody’s whispering far away, slow and singing like they’re reading you scripture, and the words go past you and burn in your pan.  “ _Messiah Raging spoke and said_ I’ll take it to my own hands and bring down the world in embers around us _, and Messiah Merciful said_ I’ll take it to my own hands and build up the world in towers and lights, _and though but troll stood as their lusus, the Immortal said—_ ”

And you see it too sharp and clear, another sight like you’re looking over his own shoulder as he sits by you and reads—bruised-up yellow-claw hand tracing words, old and beat pages, writing on flat sheets like the oldest books and you hear the words come out his mouth and yours in the same second as you follow his hand on the page.  They’re hoarse and strange on your tongue. Your lips crack.  Tongue is numb and dry and burning.  Your voice a tiny choke of a croaking whine.  “Children I love, _I’d fight for the both of you though I’d tear in half to do it, I’d build_ and _break, and bleed to make you carry forward—”_

He gasps and stops reading as he hears you and you snap and break and flash back to yourself—your body, your thoughtsponge, your burning mouth.  Someone near now, someone calling _here come here he spoke, he_ knew, _knew our scriptures unlearned—_ prayers you don’t know, blessings and cool hands on your head and eyes and mouth when all you want is _water_ , water— _fuck_ but your tongue feels dry and dull, and breathing burns in you.  Every time you go back under you get hungrier, thirstier, and they didn’t feed you, didn’t give you water last time you woke.  Just cooed and touched and blessed and then forced more of their poison down your choke.  If they do it again—

You have to get them off you a while.  You have to throw them off and keep that foul shit out of your mouth. Feels like you’re on a cliff, hanging on, and you don’t know what’s gonna happen if they kick you off it again but you don’t think you can climb back up to the light again.  Not without a rest.  You have to—

…lie.

You have to.  They’ll kill you of too much if you don’t.  You know it sharp and sudden, and you know what you have to do to get them off you.

They’re gathering.  You breathe and breathe and pray your messiahs know the lie you spit to these fuckers.  Pray you aren’t signing off your ticket. 

“… _lord Makara,_ ” someone says, and hands touch yours, take it gentle like Karkat used to.  

You want to tear that hand off.  You let it be.

“ _I,_ ” you force air in your thorax and out, fight your body for it every breath.  _Blasphemy_ whispers your pan, _don’t say it don’t say it_  but you know it to be a lie even if they don’t, and you _have to fucking rest_ , if you don’t you think it might be the end of you.  Think you might never wake back up.  Not like this.  _Not like this._  “— _messiahs._ ”

They gasp and murmur around you, all little whispering voices.  Water’s given at you.  You take barely a drink but they take it away before you’re done—it’s all you can do to whine and shiver, seeking for more. 

“What did you see?”

“…so…” so _fucking hard_ to think words, and words to lie even harder.  You breathe and think and wish you had a hand on you, warm and rough and— “— _hot,_ ” you say, far away.  “ _—red…_ ” and “… _so…fucking small_ …”

 _“The Messiah Raging,_ ” somebody whispers, and you get another drink—fuck but then it’s gone again and it _hurts_ to need it so bad and not hardly be able to move for it.  “What else?”

“ _W…ter…”_ the plea cracks with how bad you need, how it aches to have a sip and no more than that.  “—water—”

“ _Give it measured,_ ” says another over you.  “ _Not yet.  Suffering is focus in the pan of a prophet.”_

It breaks you to a cry, a harsh sob—they have water, they have it _right fucking there_ and you’re at nothing but their mercy to have it, and you want to die.  You want to fucking _die_ if it means you don’t have to keep being in your own thinkpan anymore.  You’d almost rather they gave you more of their blood-drugs, for all every taste of that fiery-sweet red blood they mix in is damnation—you’d rather go far off from your body and drift past people you used to know one time, see the ones you love and know somewhere somebody gives a fuck about you beyond the shape of your sign.  You want to go _home_.

“ _Wanna go home,_ ” you say, and comes out sobbing, but you’re too dry for tears.  The words are stupid and wrigglerish and you’re somewhere far off, under the shadow of your hive, remembering great yellow-purple eyes like yours and white fur so wet and thick and soft and a feeling like you were safe.  Just now, curled up against a big wet muzzle holding on and crying for joy, you were safe and you were small and nobody tied you down and made you look at the harsh and bright and clear of the world through burning eyes and you want—  _“—_ dad _, I want—go home, I wanna go home—dad, ff…f’k, nnh, Krllz I wan’…_ ” Your mouth is all numbed up and your body’s shaking and cold and the words trail off away and you’re just crying.  Just crying like a stupid fucking wriggler, with no tears in you to cry.  For all they talk so sweet to you not a one of them says a word of comfort.  When you stopped sayin’ words on their heretic flesh-clothed gods, they stopped hearing you.

“Leave him to rest,” says one of them, and you rouse at that as they start to rise, cry out after them, try to find the words that if they don’t let you drink now you’ll _die,_ fuck, they can’t go, you won’t be able to bear—you won’t—but they hear you and the one who told them to hold away sighs. 

“…give the prophet his water, brother,” they say, and there’s a harsh disappointment rotten in their voice.  “Feed him, comfort him to sleep.  He needs to keep his strength up if he’s to give us any solid motherfuckin’ revelation.  Whoop?”

“All whoop,” mumbles the brother who was feedin’ you scripture verse before they came to you, and there are feet and moving and you’re finally let to drink your fill as they close a door and leave you in the silence of your room.

You’re laid out again, and you sleep.

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are going out of your pan. 

Terezi isn’t helping.

“But you have no solid _proof_ that we aren’t having a shared delusion,” she points out.  “—or that a psychic somewhere is taking the opportunity to royally fuck with us.  Obviously whatever is going on is really happening, but whether it’s really Gamzee is another story!  It’s very risky to follow the little voices in your head when you don’t have psychic powers, Karkat.”

“You think I don’t fucking know that?!”

“I think you’re being very emotional about this, and emotions aren’t very objective!”

“I think you’re _very emotional_ all the time and pretend it’s okay when you do it and you should go fuck yourself!”

“I think you need to _shut the fuck up_ ,” Kurloz growls testily from the corner of the room he’s sitting in, leaned up against the wall.  “It’s not fake.”

“With all the respect you’re due,” Terezi says, and she looks tense and her voice is polite but there’s a weird pitch to her voice that makes you think that she considers that very much respect at all.  “I have heard hundreds of pan-scrambled witnesses make the same plea about hundreds of different kinds of pan-scrambling.  You cannot tell, that’s the _point._ ”

The argument starts over.  There’s a couple of changes, digressions and diversions, but your nerves are wearing really _really_ thin and your teeth are grinding so hard your horns ache by the time you and Terezi and Kurloz all slowly go still and silent. 

For a second all of you just stand there silent, barely moving to glance at each other, _you feel it too_?  _You feel him too_?  Then Terezi sniffs the air and says “…well fuck me.  Mr. Grape Jelly?”

A pang of excitement runs through you at the words.  You blink, and then realize that maybe it’s not yours—god that’s strange.  “Gamzee?”  you say, and you can’t tell whether to try to feel for him…somehow…or to try to relax your thinkpan as much as you can and let him influence you.  Trying to unpick what’s your own thoughts, wishful thinking, your own reactions—it’s like trying to sift out salt and sand. 

But the affection that hits you when you say his name, that can’t be just yours.  It feels so… _desperate._   So relieved and scared, god he must be so scared.

“Holy shit,” says Terezi frankly, and sniffs the air.  “—I keep catching whiffs of you, but you really aren’t there, are you?  Karkat, you didn’t mention how _present_ he was.”

“I told you it was really him!”

She makes a stupid, infuriating little shrugging motion, like _well you may have said something like that, yes._   _GOD_ she can be annoying sometimes.  You don’t have words for how relieved you are to hear her talking about Gamzee like he’s actually there though.  You know you felt him.  You know it.  But the more she argued the harder it was to believe yourself.

“I wasn’t aware he was so…” she frowns—shakes her head like a barkbeast coming out of the water.  “…lingering.  You’re still there, aren’t you?”  (That to the air, where Gamzee still isn’t.  You can’t shake off the feeling that you were just talking to him, that if you reach out you’ll feel him, that if you turn your head he’ll be at your shoulder.  Your thinkpan is starting to ache already.

“That’s because he _wasn’t,_ ” you say, and stare around the room.  Empty.  “It was just a couple of seconds, before.”

“They’ve been giving him more.”

Terezi’s voice sounds strange.  Distracted.  You blink and frown at her.  “What?”

She stares back at you, and her brow slowly furrows.  “…I…don’t know,” she says.  “It seems…logical.”

“More of _what_?”

“I don’t know!” she throws her hands up.  “Whatever they’re giving him!”

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you think maybe you’re a ghost.

Terezi can’t smell you, but you feel almost like you’re seen when she turns her blind head round and looks for you with things not her eyes.  A sister might be the best to see you as well as you can get seen, with her eyes so not-working like they aren’t.  You’re almost heard.

It’s like you’re yelling to her through a wall.  Her voice comes to you so loud and clear it fucking _hurts_ , but when you try to talk to her it comes out a weak breath of a thing, not hardly enough to hit her spongeclots.  She listens so hard and you can’t even get your yell on at her so’s to get heard.

But she’s _there_ and she listens and you hold on.  Stick and stay.  It’s like you’re holding up this huge-ass giant weight, getting your push on so goddamn hard just to keep on looking at them.

“The longer you can stay with us the better,” Terezi starts at you, and she’s looking almost right to you and it’s so fucking good to feel seen.  “—the more we talk to you, the more we can uncover.  Obviously you want to be here as well, but if—“  you lose the rest of the words because your pan shakes something almost like a laugh.  You want to see them, sure, you want to _be_ with them, get up near them, hold them and hurt in sweet ways that aren’t like this, but _stay here_ , talking to them like you are now?  _No,_ you don’t fuckin’ want to—god it hurts, you ain’t lasting more than seconds.

“No, I can’t,” says Karkat, and “I don’t want to,” says Kurloz.  Terezi frowns, and you sleep.

You don’t know how long you’re gone, but you wake up to your body again.  They’re wiping your face up—you bit through your lip.  Fingers touch the hurt, smear the blood, and you’re naked before them.  Face bared.  The humiliation is coming old to you; they strip you again and again, every slightest smear in the paint they bare and repaint you again and again and fucking _again._  

Your skin’s all wet and cleaned again.  There’s a stink in the air like shit and old blood and piss and you got to know where it comes from.  Another couple tons of shame add in on the ocean of it you already drown in.  Of course.  They never let you up, did they?  And god knows how long you been here.  You never paused to think about a load gaper and if you needed one—everything hurt so bad…

Your ears are burning and when cool hands touch one and pet it it’s all you can do to not yelp and snap. 

“ _…he spoke,_ ” says one, quiet like you’re sleeping.  You stay still.  “Did you write it down, sister?”

“ _…the thirteenth verse of the book of the New Immortal,_ ” a voice whispers.  “… _can’t stay, my loves, can’t bide with it, cannot fucking bear…_ ”

“He’s trying so fuckin’ hard,” one says, and cold cloth touches your face.  Too-bright cold on your skin, but you’re numbing to that too now.  Feels almost good again.  “It hurts a brother so…”

“Just proves,” says another, and you’re touched again, hand stroking your hair back.  You didn’t feel yourself cold and sweating, but their hand is warm to your skin and dry, you’re icy like a saltblood and soaked sweaty.  Lips dry and cracked open.  Some little bit of you feels the ache and tries a feeble returning ache of want and pleasure—even that goes too far.  The too-much feeling eats into you, acid on your bare thinkpan, all the pleasure goes vanishing out of the pain.  “Just shows he has it in him.  He’s the one.  _Fuck_ , that it should be in our motherfuckin’ lifetime…”

“I doubted,” says another, soft.  Cloth touches your neck, chest, dabs sweat off your gills.  The touch, there of all tender places, is enough on your too-feeling skin you can’t hold still—jerk and whine like a grub.  They take the rag away.  “Ah—fuck, _shhh, my lord, I know, shhh_ —he seemed so unwilling, and quads like he had…well.  But…fuck if he ain’t come through strong for us.  Brother u—I mean---biggest brother will come around soon, I’d bet.”

“He does as he figures best for our believers,” says the sister’s voice, stern.  “We’re few enough even with his shrewd frond to guide us, brothers.  But…yeah, I think we found the one.  He’s the prophet.  The Immortal reborn.”

“ _For Always Reborn,_ ” voices murmur.  Hands touch the borders of you, hands and feet and horntips like you’re some holy fuckin’ relic not to be touched full-on. 

“…what do we have now?”

“They haven’t sent out raids to us yet.  If they feel concern after him, they don’t show it.”  There’s disgust in his voice, and you know who they’re talking on.  You want to growl at them for the bullshit they think of your quadrants, like they wouldn’t give half a fuck about you being gone.  You’re weak and you’re shamed but they don’t have you and they don’t know what’s coming down on them.

You think on Kurloz slamming at the walls till his fronds bleed and Karkat curled away and crying, and it hurts too bad to fucking contemplate.  And you think of them coming for you and in your head you grin with all your teeth.

You feel a touch stronger now.  You close your eyes, and let yourself go sinking back down again, looking for those who look for you back.

\--

You’re in the middle of a casual shouting match with Terezi to pass the time—Kurloz watches you _really_ closely, and some part of you wonders if he’s jealous of the fact that his—his…

Part of you is wondering if he’s jealous, when all of a sudden all three of you slowly falter into silent stillness.

“He’s back,” says Terezi.  “I’m not the only person feeling this.”

“ _Sure as scriptured verse,_ ” Kurloz murmurs, more to himself than to either of you.  And then he blinks, and grins.  “…scriptured _verse,_ ” he says again, louder.  “Gamzee, you can recall your scriptures still?  You can tell us, words already spoke and written, so’s we can read out what you want to say.”  He hesitates.  “…don’t know how long we got you,” he says, a little softer, and you know how awfully tender his voice would be if you and Terezi weren’t in the room.  “…back so soon, you’d think you missed us, lit—Gamzee.”

He seems to feel the nudge of a response too—you both lean forward, frowning, trying to focus, but it’s Terezi who says “…joking.  Jokes.  And ones.”

That doesn’t sound right.  “Eleven and one,” you say.

“…Hilarities 11:1…’such a way will you split up what you’ve been given’?”  Kurloz sounds skeptical.

“…one and eleven,” says Terezi.  “Not eleven and one, one and eleven.”  You and Kurloz both nod as the numbers slot into place.  Of course those are the right numbers. 

“Ha ha, you salty motherfucker’,” Kurloz quotes, and for the first time in a long time his face cracks into that lopsided grin, showing off the empty place where the scar cuts through his lip and a missing fang makes a dark hole.  “—You can have your laughs right in front of me when we get you back.  We’ll have the holiest motherfucking riot any single dirtblood ever dreamed of getting their final rest at.  But we got to find you first.”  The smile fades.  “—if they’d send another sign—try to push me more, mock with how they have him—”

“It’s a—” you start, and “—they won’t—” Kurloz starts, and both of you stop, confused into silence.  Terezi’s voice cuts through, quiet but clear and precise. 

“That isn’t something they would dare to do,” she says.

God it’s like finally remembering a word you forgot.  Kurloz frowns at her, and then bows his head slowly and heaves a long sigh.

“Tell it at her,” He says.  You can tell it gnaws at him to say it, but he’s not dumb enough to let his pride get in the way of something important.  It’s one of the things you respect him for.  “…she’s got the knack, little one, you just say it as loud as you can at her now.”

Terezi folds her hands over the head of her cane and tilts her head back, taking a long breath.  For a long time, it’s silent.  Then—“Pain,” she says.  “…14.  2?”

“Fourteenth chapter and second verse of the book of suffering…” says Kurloz, and closes his eyes for a second, thinking.  “… _I am lost, kin.  My eyes see no colors I know._ ” 

“You don’t know where you are?” you guess, tentative, and you think maybe the tenuous sense of satisfaction, like answering a question right, is an answer.  “They took you somewhere you don’t recognize.”

More silent _yes,_ and you can’t tell if the fear that shoots through you is from you or from somewhere else beyond your grasp.  “Is there _anything_ you know about where you are?  Fuck, anything at all Gamzee, please.”

Nothing, for a while.  Terezi has her head on one side, her eyes closed as through it makes a difference, head cocked back and up and her lips slightly parted with concentration.

And then, suddenly, her brow furrows.  “…party,” she says, tentative, guessing, and takes a deep breath.  Her fingers twitch.  “…3 and…and 8?”

“Revelries 3:8 is…” Kurloz growls, kneads at his temple for a second like he’s trying to remember.  “… _the halls around you will be painted bright and all the glitter and shine a motherfucker could ever want—_ so it’s…a church vessel.  Or it’s painted up like one.”

“They wouldn’t keep him on the fleet, would they?” 

Kurloz shoves his chair back and leans to tap at a screen a few times—a 3D projection of a ship you recognize instantly as the Dark Carnival rises from it, slowly turning. 

“Just on this ship, a thousand places to hide,” he says, quiet to himself, and sweeps a hand across the interface—the Dark Carnival shrinks, and the other seven floating palaces of the church fleet, ancient and heavy and crowded with cultists, shimmer into existence around it.  The Dark Carnival is the biggest, of course, but holy fuck, even if each of them was only half the size of the flagship that’s still hundreds— _thousands_ of boltholes and hiding places.  Your acid sac, so briefly lifted by talking to Gamzee almost like he’s really here, sinks down through the floor.  “And there’s paint and painted faces in places not the fleet, and any ship could be made that way, wherever they’re keeping him could even be the only room done up so—”

The mental image is sudden and spine-chilling—white wings, a gaping maw, _way too many_ fucking _teeth_ —you and Terezi both jump like you’ve been shocked and blurt out the first word that comes to your pan.

“—angels!” you say, a second after her, like an echo.  Kurloz jerked when the picture came into your minds—at the word, he looks up sharp and sudden.

“What.”

“Angels,” you say again, not really knowing why—why the dumb wriggler horror stories would come back to you now of all times, why the picture was so sudden and sharp—did that come from Gamzee?  “Angels…”

“Seven,” says Terezi, and you can almost feel it clicking into place in your pan, like you were waiting to hear the word ( _seven, seven, seven, seven…_ ) “Seven and seven.”

Kurloz’s hands go tight on the arms of his chair.  His face is blank all of a sudden, but when he takes a slow breath, he shudders all over.

“What?”

He doesn’t answer.  A cold knot tightens in your guts.  “What does it mean?!”

“…it’s from the death of a saint,” he says, and his voice is hollow and quiet.  “…dying of some old illness, made him weak beyond his sweeps.  ‘ _I suffer pain, and want become need_ … _I am allowed no motherfucking means to make resistance._   I…’”

His voice trails off.  He’s staring at nothing, and for a second his face is the perfect picture if misery.  It makes your insides ache with ice.  “…’I’ what?!”

“… _’I wait for death, brothers,_ ’” Kurloz says, final and quiet.  “… _’pour one out for remembrance of my soul’.”_  

\--

They won’t find you.

That’s the first thing you know, when your pan is still so burned and boiled you can’t “ _know_ ” anything for real.  There’s no way.  There’s no saving you.  You’re lost.

You want to go back, see them again, even if every hurting sight of their faces kills you further, faster—but you can’t.  It’s fading away from you, you don’t have enough of it to throw yourself out of your body and off toward them again.  The cult gave you a fuckload of their burning slick nightmare-drug, more than you think you’ve gotten, for all you’re probably out and away from your pan half or more the times they forced it in your mouth—but they ain’t dosed you in a while.  Now must be them giving one of their resting times—too short, not enough to do any real helping, but enough to let it die away out of you a little bit. 

That’s all the thought you have in you— _they won’t find you.  Can’t go back to them.  All you got to do now is rest._

You sleep once and don’t even dream. They don’t fuck with you.  You’re left alone, drifting in and out of dark.  Somebody wakes you a little with a cloth scrubbing away at you, shifting you round to change cloths under you.  Scrub up your legs, careful and not lingering but still unwanted and in places you don’t want.  You feel, some bit of you, like there’s a thing to be shamed at, like you should know what’s going on and you should hate yourself the deeper for it.  But there’s more than one pair of hands, all wiping away at you real careful with soft cloths, and one wipes over your belly too close at the slit of your sheath and you go again.

By the time you stop being half-gone, you got enough pan in you to notice first thing when you wake that this is a longer rest than they’ve gave you—or you’re getting good at coming up from their far-away too-bright place and you threw it off faster.  Every muscle feels an ache and strain, less like you been beat all over and more like you ran a hundred miles, climbed a hundred obstacles, like every single part of you been pushed farther than it should go and now stretches too tight from bone to bone. 

That feeling feels good compared to how you were before, and it’s a sorry fuck-up that that’s messiahs’ honest truth—you hurt all over and it feels so fucking good just for you being in your pan to feel it.  For the fact you can lift a hand on purpose and move the fingers one after the other, even if the most moving you manage is a wobbly twitch and no more.  You can’t remember what normal felt like—know it wasn’t like this—but at least you can see out your eyes. 

…and you’re going to die.

The thought comes back over you like a wave, ice all through you from horns to heels, steals away your breath to little stutters of gasps.  You’re going to die.  You’re going to die. 

You whimper at the thought, twist like it’s a voice you can get away from, pull at your fronds all weak as a grub and make stupid little sounds begging for kindness to let you away from the miserable fuck-up your life’s turned into.  You can’t hardly move, and all it does is make your whole self feel strung tight and icy cold.  When you get a blurry look down at yourself, you see your thorax, sweaty-pale and thinner than you recall. There’s fine cloth under you all cool and damp with sweat and knotted up from your struggles—some of it low on your hips too, barely a covering, and the rest of you laid bare, but that’s not where your eyes fix and stay.

Your gills are all glinting with heretic colors.  Every stud and hoop on you, every place Kurloz put needle to you with so much care, grubscars and gills and heavy in your fins where before they were light.  Their colored filth glitters on you like a hundred red-hot needles, and you want to tear your skin off to get away from them but they’re caged into you by your own flesh and you’re too weak to do more than cringe and shake at how they sank their hands down in your love and _twisted_ like it was theirs to touch.

They come back, and for the first time you have it in you to open your eyes and look at them straight, for all it stings and aches.  Burn their faces in your pan.  The one who takes care of you is small, hardly pupated yet.  You take in the shape of his paint.  The others behind him, and all of them flinch a little back from how you look at them.  You hope, you fucking just _hope_ those heretic shit-sucking _motherfuckers_ see the judgment in your eyes.  You burn and resent.  Something is starting up in you, something huge and hot and roiling round like a star-storm.  You’re going to die going to die going to _DIE—_

“Any more words to tell…?” one of them says, gentle-tiny and almost scared and you put all your strength in a growl.  One sighs, a hand touches your shoulder—gentle as it is it still hums through your flesh like burning and you growl and then growl louder as something hot and sharp and bitter like blood wells up in your eyes and behind your tongue, boils around in your thinkpan and your guts.  How fucking _dare.  HOW FUCKING DARE THEY._   You did fuck-all to deserve this!  You did right by your kin and they went and took your sign and made it some fucking _perversion_ and now they _hurt_ you and they DON’T FUCKING CARE.

Your first try at words is a wheezy snarl that makes no sense, but you feel the hands pull away from you.  You’re weak, so goddamn _weak_ from their poison, but there’s a _rage_ in the core of you.  _You’re going to die.  You’re going to die.  You’re going to die here alone and they’ll vanish off back into the true and motherfucking holy church and hide and wait for another descendant again to take and torture and_ kill—

“— _nnnghhgget th’FUCK_ AWAY FROM ME!”

They gasp and back off further, and you can almost breathe when they don’t touch you and the rage the _rage_ burns through you like new strength, slams through your hazy thinkpan and races down all your body like hot wires.  You give a hard _yank_ at the cuffs on your wrists and it hurts even though you haven’t got the strength to hardly even pull them tight.  They’re toys.  You could break them in a second if you were right but they _fucked you up_ and you can’t and you’re so GODDAMN ANGRY. 

“ _LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!!_ ” You scream at them, the loudest and clearest words you been able to make in the whole time since they took you, and it feels like it _tears_ when they come out, like the force of it could snap your jawbones and burn the cold numb away from your horns.  “GET THE MOTHER _FUCK_ OUT OF MY FUCKING SIGHT YOU FILTHY HERETIC PIECES OF—”

Something in you gives way.  Your voice cracks and breaks and goes silent, just this breathy howl that’s barely a noise so much as air.  They run from you, heads bowed, terror takes them like your word is damnation and you hope to god they’re right and your messiahs have judged them _well-fucking-damned_ for what they’ve done.  One of them sobs.  You hope she chokes on it.  The one who cares for you looks back at the door and you see worry on his face one moment and for a second your hate threatens to waver.

You bare all your teeth at him, and you hear him run too as you curl on your side and just fucking…cry. 

There’s no knowing how long you lie there and cry yourself out sick and worn.  Other times you’ve been in grief so deep, you sank and went foggy, grey and far-off.  Not this time.  You’re so angry.  _So fucking angry_ you could breathe acid, bleed melted rock, wishing you’d known, seen that you’d even thought to _fight_.

They led you off to slaughter with a wriggler’s lie, _oh some brother’s got his search on for you_ , and you went right into their fronds and that’s how you die.  What a joke.  What an unfunny fucking _joke._

You lied before to save time, to let your beloveds get to you.  You bent for them.  But you’re going to die.  You want it sooner rather than some other time late and hurting.  Let them do it fast.  Fuck, if you ever did a good deed and your true gods ever looked on you kindly, let them do it fast.

\--

They don’t come back, and finally you sleep. 


	25. You're Just A Dream

You don’t know how long you get left where you are—you sleep most of it, and you’re grateful for that much.  You didn’t figure how bad you were getting fucked up until you got the chance to rest it off, and now you can feel yourself a little bit stronger, a little bit _more_ every time you sleep and wake up.

You grow stronger, and you grow thirstier, and you grow hungrier with no way of escaping away from your body.  You give up on tryin’ to wet your lips and your tongue—there’s no wet left in you.  When you can get an eye open and a head up to look, you see how your body lies like a skeleton.  The least you can be grateful for is that you don’t make a mess of yourself—got not enough food or water to do it with, you figure, and you lie and wait for the times you pass out again.

After three or four times waking back up, the visions start.

You see things that ain’t there, and it’s not just the weird, burning visions they gave you—you don’t go anywhere, but things appear in front of you anyway.  The walls open up and spew creeping, clawed things, nameless things that twist you with horror to look at.  Voices turn into howls and snarls and the most dread of motherfucking noises.  Kurloz stares at you and it don’t matter where you look he’s there, in front of you, standing and staring and you can see judgment in his eyes.  _HERETIC._ Then the floor turns into tar and you sink and choke and everything blacks out. 

You think he’s a vision at first, and you stare up at him as he comes to stand over you with his face painted so strange and his eyes so bright and cold.  You know this fucker for the one who withholds.  The one who tries to bring you to breaking, who wants you bent and prophesying for him so bad.

“…brother Immortal,” he says.  Takes you a long minute to know he’s talkin’ to you.  That that’s not Kurloz for them, not any more.  It’s you.  You look at him and don’t answer.  He sighs.

“I know you…resent us,” he says, and he has that sound to his voice, slow and even and tolerating like you’re a wriggler throwing fits.  “You didn’t ask for this trial, to be the only one who could bear this hardship. We must seem cruel, to you.”

 _Seem_ nothing, you want to spit out—but you’re so thirsty still, and screamed out and when you try to make a word it comes out a rasp of a harsh little croak.  Wordless.  You might be gagged for all the fucking good your mouth does you now. 

“This you,” he says, cold and sure, and you hear to his voice a…strangeness.  He’s got none of the whimsy and fine phrase of a joker raised in the church.  He speaks…straight.  Hard.  He sounds like a salt-licker.  “—is not who you are meant to be.”

You bare fangs at him too, but it’s weak.  The rage burned fierce and fast and hot but with sleep and time  now it’s ebbing.  The power that drove you with it is going too.  You can’t even growl—you’ve bought your body time to heal up a little but still you’re exhausted, scared shitless, battered up from your own thrashing and chained down.  Starving and dried up like you’re turned to sand.  You could stand now if they let you loose, you could maybe walk…even that much is a blessing after so long.  The strength to make a fist. 

Can’t fix your burning throat though.

“I heard of your outbreak last day,” he says, and he gets down on a knee.  Too close, close enough to touch—your hands clench to hit him, but you’ve gone pulling at your chains before and you know he’s too far yet, even if you had the strength to do more than push him.  “I came back to the ship as soon as I could.  Which is best for you, since it seems you scared them so badly they didn’t want to come back and care for you, hm?”  He reaches out, and you pull away but he’s got more reach than you got room to move and he touches your lip where it splits from the dry.  “…you look parched, holy one.”

 _“Kkkhhh,_ ” you croak out, more breath than noise, and imagine how wet and cool his blood would be when you drank it down.  Some little piece of you recoils off away from that thought, but your pan is all colors now, all feelings and wants from your body.  No room for high thoughts on gods and trolls, no room for anything but _your flesh is meat your blood is water you fucker I hate you I want to—_

“You still feel as you did before your outburst?”  he says, and you snap out a little bit from where you went in your pan.  Getting a brother’s thinkpan to make out words right now is a true motherfucking struggle. 

You give him a look like poison.  He sighs. 

“I’ve led a lot of misguided souls from the greater cult to the truth,” he says, and his fingers trace over the line of your face before you jerk away.  The touch was almost pale in that moment of quiet, but with that _hunger_ in him, like he’s looking the lines of you over for something he can take and destroy and rebuild into his perfect little messiah.  You can almost feel him breathe.  “I can show it to you too, brother.  Look for them.  They’ll tell you the truth.”

You jerk again—shake his hand away, for all you know he only lets go because he wants and allows.  Fucker. 

“Those are my requests,” he says and sits back.  “…allow yourself to listen.  I know you’ve glimpsed them before—it’s only natural to be nervous, but if you’ll let your mind be opened to them I know you’ll come to understand why we have to do the things we do to you.”

He smiles at you.  He _smiles_ at you. 

“And what do you want from us?”

You rattle at the cuffs, look from them back up to him.  He sighs.  “…we can’t have you injuring yourself while you commune,” he says.  “—or injuring your disciples in another…emotional…moment.  What else?”

It’s not begging, you tell yourself, it’s not asking him.  It’s telling him to give you what you need.  If you don’t think it that way, you won’t be able to bear it.  You open up your mouth and groan, long and dry and broken, and he nods.  “Ah,” he says.  “Yes, I’d forgotten.”

 _Forgotten,_ just a thing he can _forget_ when you’re lying dying, with thirst curled up on your chest pressing air out of you.  It blazes up in you hard and sharp, an echo after the first wave of hating and rage.  You hate him you _hate_ him he’s going to die by your hand kill him _kill him_ —

Water touches your lips.  You weren’t ready—choke and sputter on it but he’s uncareful pouring it and doesn’t stop so all you can do is drink and drink.  When he pulls away you’re coughing, gagging on the water that escaped down the wrong tube like a tricky little motherfucker.  The rage gets washed out by just the sheer _good_ of getting water down your throatstem again, and for once he don’t withhold or deny.  Just brings out water and lets you drink till you’re too full to drink more.

“You’ll want food as well,” he says.  “I had members of your flock assigned specifically to tend to your physical needs, but there is so much to be done—”

“ _Paint,_ ” you get out, a single big breath coughed out of you in a jagged little noise, and he stops and looks down at you like he forgot you could talk.  Your voice is still just barely there—even now you got a drink up in you you’re still screamed out and so hoarse you’re barely loud enough to hear.  “ _Leave.  It…_ ”

“Leave your paint?”

You nod, for all that you can nod at all, and he…smiles.  Shakes his head a little, laughs like to himself.

“Young prophet,” he says, and he speaks at you like a feeder to a favored student, gentle, all but mocking you.  “…you were bare-faced when you scared away your brothers and sisters who came to take care of you and they’ve been too afraid of your reprimand to come near you since.  You don’t have any paint to leave alone.”

Oh god.

Oh fucking hell oh _god_ some bit of you can’t believe it, _won’t_ fucking believe it, but when you move you can’t feel that slightest tiny tug and stretch of your paint at your skin, you can’t _feel it_ and your face is bared and you didn’t even fucking _notice._

You cough out a word that’s every foul curse you know knotted up into one mess of sound, try to pull your fronds up and hide your face—you can move better now, you’re stronger yet than you have been in a while, but the chains don’t go long enough.  He watches. 

“Yes,” he says, real quiet.  “It’s…unbearable, isn’t it?  I know.”

If you know then give me my _fucking paint back,_ you can’t say—“ _PAINT,_ ” you say instead, great and gasping and to dry again already.  “Fuck!”

“Seeing you brought low like this,” he says, and he looks at you like you’re a picture he needs memorized, like he wants to remember your naked face in smallest detail.  Your fins are burning your shame.  You can’t look at him. “…someone as…blessed…and holy as you…in a disgraceful state like this...”  His hand comes up to his face, the paint there, traces at the lines of it as he looks at you. 

He never finishes the words, just goes still and watching as you move, turn your face, pull at the cuffs with nothing in mind but to get away from his watching, hungry eyes, and know you’re going to kill him.  You’re going to _kill him._  

But not like this.  Not now, not like you are, you might do better trying to break a planet than fight him now.  “Paint,” you say again.

“You want us to paint you?”

Your eyes burn, and there’s rage to it but you know also the burn is wet and hot and you feel yourself bared and paintless, feel your lips start trembling.  Fuck _fuck fuck fuck_.  You’re losing it, that knife of certainty you held for all of a second, you’re getting blurred and smeared up with fear.  Hate, fury, fear.  Hate, fury, fear fear _fear—_

“It will be our design,” he says, and he watches you so hard and you don’t remember how to breathe, how to think, your pan’s all shook up and spinning and you can’t breathe your face is bare you can’t not in front of him stop fucking _stop_ you need it— “—and we will apply it, of course, since you haven’t learned the Faces of the Messiahs, and we will need to prove to the younger disciples that your holy rage was, of course, temporary—they will do well to learn the paint for you, since your disciples will the ones to apply it in the new order—”

All their filthy hands on you, their faces and ways, _no_ , fuck no, but when you shake your head he just sighs a little bit and shrugs.

“Very well then, Immortal,” he says, and starts to turn.  “—our plans are going to continue as they would.  We can’t afford to wait.  I only hope after all this is over you can find it in you to understand we did what we had to—”

“ _Nngh—_ “

No, no no no but you can’t just lie here bare and let them watch your face as they torture you.  He knows you need it, need almost as bad as the water and food, and he stops and don’t look back at you yet.  You can feel yourself uncovered like bare flesh with no skin over it, and that little safety being taken from you now when you’re so fucking scared is all you can bear and more.  You can’t— _can’t_.  Go without.  Not now.  You can’t suffer bare-faced in front of them.  You can’t die bare-faced under their eyes.

“ _…my,_ ” you get out.  “… _paint…_ ”

“Yes?”  Still not looking at you.  “Don’t worry, we will do nothing without your consent.”

God you want to throw up. 

“ _…paint me,_ ” you say, and it sounds like breaking.  “… _p…fuck_ — _please._ ”

“You’re sure?”  he looks back at you, and you almost wish you could see victory in his eyes, that he’s just playing with you to make you bow for him.  He looks like there’s worry to him.  Like he wants you to want this.  You can’t beg again.  Can’t.  Your mouth tastes like acid and blood.  You can already feel damnation  creep into you, through eyes and ears and coating across your motherfucking tongue, and the tears are breaking and running down your cheeks now and you want to go home.  It’s all you can do to nod.  “…alright.”  He comes back to you, comes to one knee and leans down, and you don’t dare to throw him off when he reaches out and wipes off a trail of tears from your face.  He could still decide to not.  Could still leave you bare and throw you back under with nothing between you and any fucker who wants to see.

“…another attempt,” he says, and his hand touches your face, a finger over your bare lips and you know the touch from the first time you woke.  It feels now more than it ever did like a motherfucking _desecration._   You’ll kill him.  If it’s the only thing you get to do before they kill you, you want it to be his death.  You don’t move.  “You’ll be painted before your ordeal, brother.  Don’t worry.”

He stands again.  “…but it’s full day, now,” he says, and stands tall and straight, rolling his neck back to look out past you at the stars through the glass.  “…you’ll have to endure a while longer, I’m afraid.  In the afternoon, you’ll be painted, fed, watered, whatever you would like.  And then…well.  We’ll try again.”

You won’t beg for him to do it now, here.  You _won’t._   You don’t know if that’s what he wants—if he’s trying to push you, hoping you’ll beg—or if he just doesn’t think of you as full faithful, if he doesn’t know or give a fuck how much the paint matters to you.  Don’t matter.  You keep your mouth shut and watch him go with murder at the back of your tongue and eyes that burn inside, full of hate and tears. 

\--

“It’s been two nights,” says Karkat, grim, and scrolls idle from ship to ship on the screen.  The Blessed.  The Sinner. The Joker.  Elixer and Stardust, fused together in their slow, wild tumble across the nothing.   The Freakshow.  The Penitent.  And biggest and heaviest and most full of all, The Dark Carnival, leading the fleet through the stars.  He looks at them so hard, like if he just keeps staring sharp enough he’ll see Gamzee through a window or some shit.  “I know you don’t want people to know about this, Kurloz—”

You hate him for knowing that name.  You know you never told him.  Everything he says to you under that name comes hard and sharp to the core of you, the part that still answers to _Kurloz Makara._   Takes him past sweeps of time and struggle to your center.  Fuck him fuck him _fuck him_.

“Are you listening?”

You blink and glare at him.

“I didn’t think so.”  He sighs out and rubs the side of his face like he ain’t even thinking about it—you know that absent touch.  Seen a troll kept too long from their moirail.  His hand stays on the side of his neck, on his cheek, runs over his hair as he talks, like he doesn’t notice he’s doing it.  “…One of my friends from the home planet is on her way.  She’s psionic, and she can…” he pauses just a second.  “…she can talk to the dead.”

Air goes cold and thick inside you.  He must see the look on you because he sits up straighter, raises up his hands.  “I don’t think he’s dead!”  He says, and your insides chill again, every time he says that word you feel the cold set in a little more.  “—but—there’s some kind of weird spirit shit going on, and I guess—I just thought—fuck, if there’s anybody who can probably communicate better than us with this batshit psychic haunting stuff, and…who isn’t completely bugfuck by now…it’s probably her.”

“Psionic,” you say, and click your tongue against the hole in your teeth where your left front fang used to be, considering.  “…what color is it.”

“Are you serious.”  Vantas rolls his lookstubs at you.  “ _She_ is a rustblood, and don’t even start—”

“No.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake you stubborn old _bigot,_ tug that swollen appendage you call a head out of your digestive tract.”

You don’t justify that bit of swagger and growl with a response.  “This is church business.”

“So somehow you’re okay with _me—_ me, the mutant off-spectrum _freak_ —working on this, but not a rust-blood.”

Wriggler has no fucking _concept._   “Not the same,” you snap out, and he scoffs at you like you’re saying nonsense.  “You earned your spot here.  She ain’t got enough _sweeps_ in her life to think about earning—”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” he says.  “It took you all of…what, a couple of weeks?  To get used to me?  And I’m not even on the spectrum!  Terezi was helpful and you didn’t want her here either.”

“She’s teal,” you point out—pretty motherfucking _reasonably_ , you think, because apparently you got your quadranting done at a dumbass wriggler who don’t know how colors work.  “Not some— _rusty_ dirt-grubber.”

He makes a disgusted noise.  “You bigoted old shitheel.”

“You idealistic little bleeding pusher,” you snipe back.  “Rusties got no interest in our color any-fucking-way, you think you did her a favor sending her up here to _help out_?  She won’t thank you.”

“I didn’t ask for anybody to thank me,” he says, and when he draws himself up you know he been watching Meenah, learning her ways and her looks, how to stand like you got the right to give orders.  “I asked for my moirail back and you and your idiotic obsession with colors are not going to stop me.”

You make him shut up with your mouth.  He takes to the kiss like he was angling for it the whole time, and you pull him up against you with two big handfuls of his ass and forget about your problems for a bit.

\--

They come back to you and bring you water and food and you know they’re going to put you under again.  They come with paints and brushes and you know they’re going to cover you again and it’s a shame and a weakness how grateful you are to see them just for that.  The first stroke of white goes on your skin and you feel something in you relax.  The shapes they make re wrong, but at least there’s something.  At least you’re covered, and when they pull back you can look up at them and be ready for what’s coming.

“Another attempt, kin,” says the leader, and brings up a bottle of their drug, thick and black.  There’s no sign to show the strain of bright red blood mixed up in it, but your acid sac rebels anyhow.

“I don’t fucking want to,” you say, and it comes out a little like a sulky wriggler but it comes out clear and you look around them and know some of them heard you. 

“ _Before the attempt is made_ , though,” he says over your voice, and he looks down on you and your insides go cold and tight at the look in his face.  It’s coming again.  You don’t know what, but suffering is coming down on you again.  “We must address our brother’s…lapse of spirit.”

Murmurs and whispers.  They can’t hurt your body in any way substantial, but you know now how they can go inside your pan and fuck around there, and this motherfucking shitheel has ways you’ve not have ever even _thought_ of before.  You feel a single clawing jab of fear, and then he pulls out a heavy, dark book and he starts to read.

You try not to listen—you know now if you hear his scripture it will lay root up in your thinkpan and shit, it’ll try to get its grow on and stay where it ain’t wanted, and you can’t be having with that _shit,_ gotta keep it out of you.  But there’s a boiling hum laying on and around his words and you got just a second to realize the church ain’t the only ones who’ve learned the depth and strength of their ‘voodoos before that burn hits you in the horns and rolls down your spine and turns your bones twisting in horror.

You got no words to think with, nothing left, your pan whites out blank and roaring—if you had words you’d think how there’s not even fear to the feeling, how you can’t rightly call it being afraid or disgust or even hate up in your pan, just the _need_ to get away.  Needing to get away from his voice is the sudden and strongest need you ever had, more than how thirsty you were before, more than the hunger eating at you, more than the pain in your body, get away get _away get away_ _GET AWAY—_

 _“…but no fear, you who were lead astray,_ ” whispers his voice, and that one line comes through clear and soft, no horror wrapped around it, before the words go sharp and unbearable again and sink in you like knives.  It’s not like when the drug tears at you—that pushes you right out your own pan, you escape them a while.  But this traps you in yourself.  Hunted like an animal, nothing in your thinkpan, _get away get away run get away from him please please please run get away RUN—_ his voice keeps coming back to you in soft little phrases like a moirail’s hand through a fury, touches of comfort, _do you believe?_   And _let your voice be heard, ye faithful_ and half you recognize as your own scripture and half are strange to you, blasphemies you can’t help but be thankful for as they cut through the shit he’s pouring out on your pan.

“…are you aware, brother?”  his voice says, and it’s soft and gentle almost, and the ‘voodoos die away and the lack of them is relief of a kind like you didn’t know you could feel.  “Are you aware the sin and depravity that has tortured you to this point?  This is the purge of that perversion.  Are you _aware_ , brother?”

“ _Fuck,_ ” you get out your mouth, and it comes out high and tight and out of air, you can’t get in a breath.  “—fuck _fuck_ FUCK—!”

He hits you, hard and sharp and burning on your cheek like a brand—snaps your head on one side, sets your pan ringing.  He kneels over you, those sharp, sharp eyes.  You wish you’d figured he’d do that—you could’ve snapped at his fingers.  He wouldn’t look so high and fucking _mighty_ bleeding and screaming and bloody at the stumps where they were.

“ _Focus,_ brother Immortal,” he hisses, “Focus!  You cannot enter communion again with an impure heart.  We sit in the shadow of our dooms and you _cannot fail us._ ”

_In the shadow of doom._

“ _Could’ve taken me so far,_ ” you say, and it’s a wonder if he even understands, your voice is so numb and your words all twisted up and slurred.  “ _Could’ve run to the…ends of the black nothing…he’d still_ find _you._ ”

He hits you again.  “ _Fight it._ ”

“ _Ain’t you scared,_ ‘brother’?” Heavy and shaking.  “— _he could reach his hand out—take you right from the sky—_ ”

“We’ll protect you from him.” 

“ _You don’t have—enough._ ”

“We have lowbloods enough to fight off a raid, and two-dozen faithful to defend you.”  He says, and you cling to that with all you got, shove it down in your pan.  If the ones you love come after you, even if you’ve left off the face of this sinful universe and gone on and out up to the Dark Carnival, you will _not_ leave them coming in here blind.  If they have to fight for your corpse, they’ll do it with a knowing ahead of time what they’re coming up against.  “Are you prepared, brother?”

“Where—am I.”

“Safe.”

“ _Where the FUCK AM I?!”_

“Ask the messiahs,” he says, and there’s a hint of joke in his tone and a needle of mocking smile as he grabs a horn and squeezes so hard your world goes fuzzy and flashing.  You don’t feel him open your mouth or the burn of the drug in your insides, but it’s gotta have happened because a minute later you’re gone.

\--

Gamzee comes back that day after days and nights of silence.  He’s faint, barely a tickle in the back of your pan compared to how he was before, and you only get snatches but you get enough.  Get a number above twenty, and the picture in your pan of a rabble of faceless dirtbloods, armed up to the fangs.  A longing burned down into you that whispers _they say I’m still close we’re still close by I don’t know where but we’re_ close.  And then he goes again.  For the rest of the night and day straight, reports come in in groups and clusters, pushing and asking and saying _where is he?  Why does this keep happening?  Karkat, what the hell is going on?  Lord, what is even going down up there?  Kurloz, lordship, you mind telling me why is the little Makara showing up in my devotions?_

You got to wonder if there’s a balancing act here.  A high wire.  When they rest him and drug him less, he heals a little but comes to you fainter.  When they push him to the breaking limits of pan and body, he comes to you almost real, like he could whisper in your ear.  You can’t stand him hurting, but you need him helping.  Can’t go without his help, and he can only give it by hurting.  A great cruel motherfucking _joke._ Riddle of yourself sitting on your own fronds, worrying like an old hivebent rustblood on its last legs.

You know your beloved has despaired.  You don’t know what they plan for him, how long he’ll last, where he is, what your next move should be.  All you know is you _are_ going to find him.  No other way can be before you.  You will tear up the universe and shatter the sky.  You will not let him be taken from you.

“Well,” says Karkat, and you look up as it breaks through the sharp, thinking quiet that’s always left after Gamzee has faded off again back to suffer alone.  “If— _when_ —we find him…when we do the raid, I’m bringing my flaysquad.”

You glower at him, but fucking glory be, as he is your kismesis and most mightily a pain in your ass, he doesn’t seem to give a fuck.  “What color.”

“I’m not telling you that, because—and I know these words are hard for you to _understand,_ so I’m gonna say them _really slowly_ and hope they penetrate your dense shriveled old sponge-clots—IT’S…NONE…OF…YOUR… _BUSINESS._ My threshecutioners are just as good at strike missions as your laughsassins, and way _way_ better at taking prisoners in for questioning.”  He crosses his fronds.  “They’re coming with us.”

Pushy little jank-blooded little _pain-in-the-ass MOTHERFUCKER._

“This is _church.  Business._ ”  You say it just as slow and clear and loud as he did at you, like he’s a dumbass who can’t understand the words—which _a-fucking-pparently_ he _is_ because you can’t even count the number of times you’ve said this already at him and the concept don’t seem to come close to digging down in his neurotic little mutant pan.  Meenah always got _church business._   Meenah has fucking _respect._   “Church business means church handles it, little upstart.”

“You would never have figured out who poisoned you if I hadn’t been here,” he says, and it rankles and burns at you that he’s right, damn him.  “All the other squads help each other out and work in mixed groups all the goddamn time!  I mean fuck, they hate it and each other, and they’re constantly bitching and fighting, but they do the fucking work when it comes down to it.  I’ve lead…fifty?  Sixty?  Sixty missions already working with the ruffianihilators, and they’re a bunch of total bulge-sores but goddamn if it isn’t nice to have them in the front with the heavy armor doing what they do best while my squads come through for the fucked-up pieces of resistance left standing.  And then there’s _you_ fuckers!”

“We got on fine a hundred _hundred_ sweeps without you coming in shoutin’ and bitchin’ and making a wicked sound in my ringed-up auriculars,” you growl at him, and he makes little _blah blah blah_ motions with a hand and rolls his eyes.  “Vantas if you want to _keep that fucking hand_ do _not_ test me on this right now.”

He don’t look intimidated, but he does lower his hand. 

“You work so _freakishly_ well with each other,” he says, “—if you would just use the rest of the empire like that, like it’s supposed to be used, you’d get so much more _done,_ it’s fucking monkeyshit bananas.  It’s like your whole color is coming to the fight with no weapons in your hands when the rest of us are just sitting here waiting to do our _jobs_ and you’re just like NOPE I’M DOIN’ JUST FINE WITH MY BAD SELF, I’LL JUST PUNCH THE BATTLESHIP TILL IT EXPLODES.”  He puts on a mockery of church accent for those words, a whimsy and accent of seaside he must have picked up from Gamzee, and it pisses you off how close it rings to true. 

“We don’t _need_ weakshit dirtblood _help_ ,” you spit, and he bristles at the venom sharp around the words.  “We are _enough_!”

“We’re not ‘enough’!”  He slams a hand down.  “If we were ‘enough’ we would have found him by now!”

“Well then maybe you got more you should be giving then, because I’m using all I got at my fronds to fix this—!”

He bristles up, bares al his teeth and makes a noise like sizzling flesh.  “What the fuck are you trying to say?!  You’re barely capable of thinking straight when it comes to these fuckers, let alone—being _objective_ , or—or coming up with rational theories and plans, and you’re telling me I should—”

“ _At least I’m trying,_ you mouthy little—!”

“TRYING?!”

“—to stand there and tell me how I feel makes me not a use to find him because if you fucking _cared_ about him you’d be as FUCKED UP ABOUT THIS AS I AM!”

Silence rings.  He stares at you, and you realize sudden and sickly that you’re standing, that he’s pale under the dark hue of his skin, that your voice rose to a yell and that what you feel is painted across your face clearer than any joker’s mask.  Fuck.  Fuck, but you didn’t mean to say that, not that stupid fuckery that’s been ringing around your pan.  Frantic panicking animal thoughts your pan may have, but putting voice to them is going too far. 

Karkat stares and stares, and his eyes are washed just so slightly orange and wet and you don’t know how to say that’s not what you meant and if he starts fucking _crying_ you’re going to—to…

“…you’re stressed the fuck out,” he says, and he sounds so strung-out and tired all sudden and quiet.  The fight is gone out of his voice.  “…if you weren’t, you would know that was…a stupid fucking thing to say.”  Easier to look down at the ground than it is to look at him.  You turn and start toward the door, and his voice rises again, sharp and commanding at you somehow.  You think of sermons and burning flesh and screaming and bright red eyes looking through your soul.  “ _Don’t turn your back on me,_ Kurloz.”

“...Meenah,” you say, and it’s a petty explanation and a pathetic excuse but god you need her right now.  You’re so tired.  So stupidly fucking tired. 

You go, and he doesn’t say another word after you.

\--

There’s no point being in the block once Kurloz is gone.  You get to your feet slowly, resisting the feeling that you’re going to fall to pieces if you move too fast, and hobble out into a painted corridor, staring around.  Where can you even go right now?  You need quiet.  Somewhere quiet.

You know the winding walkways and twisting corridors of this ship way too well by now, and with a little bit of meandering you get up a few levels, flashing your imperial insignia at any purpleblood that starts to give you appraising looks or bare their fangs at you.  There should be a whole series of study rooms, you’ve seen them; rooms where the feeding-age wrigglers get together and finally try studying in the last two days before the test.  You never had rooms like this anywhere else on the fleet that you were in school-feeding, but then again you wouldn’t have had a group to fill one with anyway.  As it is, half the rooms you pass are full of smaller, paler-skinned clowns in huddles and groups, more or less studying.  Some of them look downright studious, some of them are having drinking parties, some of them are doing their best to do both at the same time.  You wonder about Gamzee where they are now, sitting with a group of other trainees, chatting with kids his color like he never really got to with any of you on his trollian list, and a pang of guilt mixed with something sweet and painful shoots through you.

  Stupid _stupid_ how the hell did you ever end up where you are when your thinkpan is the consistency of a weeks-old corpse and—

You can’t break down over this.  You can’t break down over this.  _YOU CAN’T BREAK DOWN OVER THIS._   Through sheer force of will you get your hands to relax at your sides and shove the boiling panic and helplessness deep down in your thinkpan. 

You really need to settle down.  Maybe if you read a little bit.  Is that allowed?  Actually you retract that question because you don’t care about your own answer. It doesn’t matter if it’s allowed or not, you’re doing it anyway.  You pick a data cartridge at random ( _Holidays and Celebrations of the Elder Church_ ) shove it in your palmhusk and huddle over it, staring at the screen and not really watching.  If Aradia gets here and can see him, what then?  If Aradia gets here and _can’t_ see him, you’ve brought her on a ship that’s just as likely to make paint out of her and carve up her horns for jewelry as to let her go.  Completely apart from any other reason that would make you an absolute scummy bulge-douche who uses his fellow lowbloods like tools with no scruples, it would also really suck.  And Sollux might kill you.

“…ntas…? _”_

You jerk upright as a hand touches your shoulder, hands flexing for your sickle, teeth baring to growl—and then stop.  It’s not some hulking clown looking for a fight.  It’s a little skinny fleet brat in badly-fitted clothes, with awkward crooked-looking horns.  They flinch a little bit when you jerk upright, and then relax as you do, watching you with big timid eyes that are still pure silver.  God, did you ever look that small?  Was your voice ever so small and high and fluting, without even a hint of hum from a matured chatterbox underneath it?  God. 

“…what?”

“I…A motherfucker was just saying, and all…” they stall, fidgeting, then finish all in a rush, “—are-you-okay-feeder-Vantas?”

You stare at them.  They stare back.

“Uh,” you say, and for the first time in a long time, an incredulous giggle tries to bubble up out of your thorax.  You stomp it down sternly.  “…what the fuck?”

They shrink, and despite yourself you feel like kind of a tool.  You imagine Gamzee, as he was when you knew him on Alternia, and something hot and bittersweet shoots through you.  He would have been this small—smaller even.  Skinny and malnourished, flaky-horned and wide-eyed. 

“…just…all hunched up and not like we know you,” they say, in a chagrined kind of mumble.  “…sorry big brother.”

Holy shit, _big brother._   “Feeder” Vantas?  What the _fuck_?  Now you look past them, you can see a bunch of other little clown-painted faces behind them, all huddled and watching you with what looks like _genuine concern._  

You may or may not be floundering in unfamiliar waters right now.  What the fuck. 

“Why are you calling me that?”  It comes out a little bit strangled, and you’re not really sure if that’s because you want to laugh, you’re trying not to yell, or both.  Either way, the lack of open hostility seems to make the little clown braver.

“Figured you for a feeder,” they say, earnest now, talking faster now that they know they’re not in trouble.  “I mean—all getting your rowdy stomp on all over the Dark Carnival and shit, and taking up time with the King of Colors and the other schoolfeeders, and not with a fear in your body for the bigger of our kin, we just…we thought…”

The little clownlings murmur and nod.  Your cheeks may or may not be a little bit red now.  So, they thought you had the bearing of a schoolfeeder, huh?  That’s…that’s a pretty prestigious position, on this fleet.  They only teach their own color and they only take the best of the best to do it.  You still remember the day Gamzee finally got together with you to jam about his (god) official first time pailing his matesprit, and how at the end just when you’d started to settle down for a long cuddle in the pile he’d sprung upright and blurted out _oh wait brother wait I forgot to tell you all what honor got put on me today too!_   And he’d fanboyed at you for a good ten minutes about how badass the feeders were, how knowledgeable and experienced they were, how getting picked to be one of them would just be the very motherfucking _bitchtits._   It’s been a long time now since then—then again with all the chaos that’s happened between then and now, you wouldn’t be surprised if the topic hasn’t had time to be considered again. 

“…uh,” you say, and this time you’re the one that stalls, trying to think of what to say, what to do, what the fuck kind of expression you’re supposed to make.  “—I…yeah.  No I’m…okay.”  It feels so weird to even consider talking about your emotional state with another troll—on the Condescension, you would be ass-deep in trouble if you started spouting off genuine statements about how you felt at somebody.  But…god, this stupid _family_ thing is catching, and if they’ve decided they think you’re part of it, well…you’ve been here with Gamzee long enough to see the kind of support and safety you can expect.  You take a deep breath, and hazard, “…Just…trying to help one of—a brother…out…and I don’t know where to go next.  And K—the guy I’m working with has fucked off to be jam with his moirail, which I get, but my moirail’s…not around.  Nothing you little fuckers can help with.  Adult stuff.”

They all look impressed and saddened by this jewel of information and wisdom.  The one that tapped your shoulder reaches out and makes a little gesture in the air between you, and then closes their hand into a fist and holds it there.  You stare at it for a second, and then your pan clicks into action and, kind of cautiously, you reach out and bump your fist against theirs.  Apparently this is the right thing to do, or at least not a giant faux pas, because they duck their head at you and grin.

“You all came over here just because I looked…” you flounder again—even in this bizarre new weirdly-caring environment, ‘upset’ is too vulnerable of a word.  “…wrong?”

“Well…” the one talking to you shuffles their feet.  “I mean, no.  Another brother’s got his look on for you.  Said he knew we could find you fastest and all.”

“Another…?”  Your thinkpan is still ringing from the vicious snarl in Kurloz’s voice, the tired slump of his shoulders when he left the block and the despair that sinks into your bones when Gamzee comes to you these nights.  It can’t be Kurloz wanting you back, or they would be more excited about it.  “Who?”

\--

“Oh,” you say, and Uderak doesn’t jump but one of his hands twitches as he turns around to look at you standing in the entrance to his block.  “You.”

“Found him, brother!”  the little one who tapped you pipes, and Uderak glances at them just long enough to grin before he looks back at you, sober. 

“I’ll owe you,” he says.  “Now off, kin, you got schoolfeeding to attend to.  I have things to say to…Vantas.”

“Do him respect like he deserves, brother,” one of the little clowns mumbles, a little uncomfortably, and Uderak glances back at them and raises his eyebrows.  “…at least putting his title at him, ain’t right to call a feeder not a feeder.”

Uderaks’s eyes flicker from you to them and back again.  You endeavor to shrug in such a way that it’s clear you don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on with them, but also so you don’t look like you’re defending yourself to him.  You don’t fucking _need_ to defend yourself to this guy. 

“…rrrrright,” he says, very slowly.  “…I got words to say to, uh…Feeder Vantas.  Get on, there you go.”

As soon as the door closes, his blank face crumples.  He snorts and then laughs out loud and you cross your arms and frown as he makes little hissing huffs of laughter.

“Was there something you actually _wanted_?”  You inquired acidly, when he doesn’t seem to be getting tired of the joke after a good ten seconds of laughter.  “Because I was busy.”  You weren’t busy, but he doesn’t need to know that.  He doesn’t need to know anything about you.  He sits up and dabs at his eyes, and then clears his throat and settles back in his seat, composing himself to a more serious expression.

“…I want in.”

You meet him blank stare for blank stare.  “In.”

“Yeah, candyblood motherfucker, _in._ Don’t play games with me now.”

“In on what.”

He huffs out a breath.  “—on finding who took him,” he says, and meets your eyes squarely.  “Finding who took Ga—Gamzee.”  He winces a little in the middle of the name like he didn’t mean to use it, but you’re too poleaxed by the sudden sharpness to give him the shit-eye for it and what the hell, it’s just his name.  It’s his name, that’s fine.  Uderak rallies a little when he doesn’t get in trouble, and he’s talking faster now, more fluidly, in his element.  “—he’s nowhere around and nobody’s seen him, _nobody_ has seen him, not for weeks now.  You know how hard that is to have when the fleet is full of kin who all know each other’s faces?  He’s not on the fleet.”

The air goes out of you.  “—fine,” you say, because there’s no point denying it, and he swallows and you know he wasn’t 100% sure, that you’ve confirmed his fears.  “—yeah.  This is top-secret shit, you get that?”

“Wouldn’t tell a motherfucking soul,” he says, and when you give him a sharp look he crosses his hands in front of his throat.  “If I lie let me die.”

That sounds like probably some kind of…cultural bullshit.  Considering how seriously these assholes take their rituals and their phrases and their oaths and scriptures and shit, you think that’s probably trustworthy.  If it’s not…well.  You’re not Kurloz and you’re sure as fuck not Gamzee.  It’s not your favorite idea, but you aren’t going to balk from some clown-culling if you have no other options. 

“And how do you think you can help?”  you say, trying to sound level, maybe almost bored.  If he wants in on this, he’s going to have to impress you.  “And don’t just give me the ‘I know secrets’ speech ag—”

 “Because they’ve come to me.”

Your pusher double-beats.  “They?”  You say, and you try to make it sound cool and disinterested but it comes out kind of strangled instead.  “Who?  What the fuck are you talking about?”

He looks down at his lap.  His hands clench and loosen again. 

“… _cult of flesh,_ ” he says, very quietly.  “That’s who it is, right?  That’s who took him.  No secret if you know where to look what they’re after is his line.”

Fuck being cagey.  You need answers.  Uderak flinches when you slam a hand down on the table and stand up, pacing across the room and back.  “—yes,” you say, once you’ve got the words lined up.  “—it’s them, they’re back, that doesn’t mean fuck to me but I guess for you guys it’s bad news, so let’s just get that out of the way now.  And yeah, they’ve got Gamzee, and _no_ we don’t know where but we do know it’s…not good.  It’s really bad.  They’re—” your voice cracks just a little—you have to cough to get it under control, and he averts his eyes from whatever expression you make.  His hands are shaking minutely.  “—they’re…doing things to him.  Stuff we haven’t—we don’t know how it—”

“Stop.”

You stop.  He’s bent over, running his hands through his hair, hunched in on himself—his hands are shaking worse than ever.  You imagine getting this news all at once, getting all the slow, creeping dread you’ve been growing into, but all at once, and feel a little bit ashamed of yourself. 

And then you put two and two together and realize what he’s saying, and your insides flip over. 

“What do you mean, the _cult_ has _come to you_?”

Uderak cringes just a little.  One of his snakes slithers up into his lap and he holds out a hand gratefully, letting it slither into his palm and wind around his fingers.  He pets it as he talks, more to the tabletop than you.  You get the really clear impression that this guy is way _way_ more comfortable _getting_ answers than giving them.

“I had a palemate,” he says.  “Before.  I broke up with her, but she got a couple friends she introduced, they were…they were fuckin’ weird.  Acted holy and pious as fuck but didn’t ever not quite… _mean_ it.  They been real cagey about it, real slow.  But they—they do keep _pushing._ ”

“Pushing for what.”

He sighs outa long, slow breath.  “ _Pushing at my faith,_ ” he says quietly.  “Tryin’ at making me _doubt._   Started—perigees ago.  After Ga—after my eye—” he stops.  “…I told them ‘fuck off’ but I figure they need fronds more than they want caution right now, if their move is made.  I could—I could get—”

You see where he’s going, and where he’s getting the idea; a man on the inside would be spectacular, obviously.  But…god, purples do things so slowly, can _afford_ to do things over sweeps and sweeps and take things more cautiously than any warmer bloodcaste, and y the time these fuckers he’s talking to so much as give a hint of who they’re actually working for it’s likely Gamzee will be—

…somewhere else.  Moved to a new location or something.  Fuck fuck fuck.

“We don’t have time to wait for them to _induct_ you,” you growl, and Uderak wraps his arms around himself and stares straight ahead, face very tense and set and still.  “God knows how long that would take!”  And then, before you can stop the words and because you have spent _weeks_ locked up with Kurloz and the aftermaths of his daymares, you add, “—and none of these other assholes would want you to do that, they want you to get a good seat to the show or whatever.”

He blinks and then snorts and then laughs, a little broken and hysterical.  You glare at him.  “What?”

“That’s _right,_ ” he says, and laughs again.  “The fuck you picked up that little bit of church from, candyblood?  Haha…” he trails off into a sort of long, shuddery sigh, the melted half-assed version of a real laugh.  You both know where you picked it up from. 

“…so no,” you say, and for the first time since you’ve met him, when he gives you that calculating look and nods it’s actually bearable.  God, the things you can get used to.  It is fucking disgraceful.  “No, don’t make contact with them again.  As far as we know, they don’t know that we’re looking for them, or that he can communicate with us.  The last thing we want to do is make them suspicious that we’re looking.”

“Sure,” he says, and you would swear he hisses a little bit on the _shhhhh_.  “What do I look out for?  There’s enough who leave the fleet every night that can’t be it.”

“Yeah, no.”  You think for a while, fitting his assets into the diagram in your head (fucking love diagrams) going through your new assets one by one.  “…okay.  You have two jobs.  Keep them off our backs, and find out as much as you can about those… _friends_ you were talking about.  _Without_ them knowing you’re putting out fronds.  Got it, shitsponge?  If you were ever any good at sneaking, now’s the time to prove it.  Find out if _they’ve_ left the fleet recently.  Find out if any of their quadrants go missing or…”

“Or miss devotions,” he says, and his eyes are starting to light up now, sharpening.  “If they’re lax in prayer, keep away from the family, I’ll check them too.  Some faithful pray off on their own by choice, but if they’re hived up with the fuckers pushing at me…”

Your palmhusk chimes.  Uderak is already pulling things out of his sylladex, whispering into envelopes and laying out papers and screens and data grubs, and he ignores you until you read the message on your screen and stand up abruptly.  He stops and looks up.

“Keep me notified,” you say, and you think you can actually see respect in his eyes.  “I have something to do.”

\--

You don’t go to your palemate expecting them to agree with you on all your bullshit, but Meenah is even less swimpathetic than usual.

“Nnnnnope,” she says when you’re done growling at her about it and she’s done with her couple seconds thinking.  “Nope, nubs is right.”

You growl at the words—she ain’t having that shit.  Whaps you on the back of the head. 

“He’s.  _Right.”_ She repeats.  “The empire’s a lotta tools, Kurlz, if you don’t _use_ ‘em for shit you’re gonna finned yourshellf backed up in a corner one of these nights.”

God you hate when she’s right.  Almost as much as you hate it when _he’s_ right. 

“Church business,” you start, and she glubs and rolls her eyes.  “We got what’s ours and we deal!”

“You got what’s yours and you deal,” she repeats back.  “—but you could be doin’ more than _deeling_ , mothaglubber.”

“Fuck you,” you say, and she giggles and pats your head like you’re a sulky wriggler.  You growl and she raises up her eyebrows at you like _come on then, do your worst_.

It’s a couple minutes later, and you’re on top of her with both hands full of her tits and her teeth dug in your shoulder, when your palmhusk goes off.

“HEY ASSHOLE!”  shouts Vantas’s voice, and you groan and shake off her teeth enough to sit up.  A second later another message, and Meenah laughs as your palmhusk shouts at you again.  You’re going to kill Vantas someday for doing whatever he did that made your palmhusk do that every time he messages you.  You just… have to figure out what he did.  Somehow.  Fuck if you know how to do half the things they’ve made them do now.  Maybe if you can figure it out you can make his say something that prickles his spade as bad as that annoying staticky shriek prickles yours.

carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling terrorizingCachinnation [TC]

CG: I’M BRINGING ARADIA ON BOARD, COME UP HERE AND SETTLE YOUR HONKING LUNATICS DOWN.

CG: FUCK, YOU’RE OFF-FLEET AREN’T YOU.

Well you could have told him _that_ was going to happen.  Goddamn rusties got no place just pulling in on a church fleet ship.  You still can’t believe he got any muckblood anywhere near the holy flagship, no matter what he promised. 

TC: ah settle your tight little glutes

TC: I GOT THIS

You sign that one off before he can swear and yell at you, and flip open to a new room. 

terrorizingCachinnation [TC] began trolling::group18482392CC [shove an elixir bottle up your chute you fat nasty trash]

TC: kin i got a job needs doing and I’M WAY THE FUCK OFF FLEET. 

TC: who’s on?

It takes a second, then a couple icons pop up colored.

abstersiveDetoxifier [AD] has joined group18482392CC [shove an elixir bottle up your chute you fat nasty trash]

sacredDidaction [SD] has joined group18482392CC [shove an elixir bottle up your chute you fat nasty trash]

grandlyCosmic [GC] has joined group18482392CC [shove an elixir bottle up your chute you fat nasty trash]

GC: ~*we11 he11000000 there*~

GC: ~*what can we d0 f0r y0u t0n1ght?*~

mortalRigor [MR] has joined group18482392CC [shove an elixir bottle up your chute you fat nasty trash]

AD: Do you have something to axx of us, sir, or is this going to be another sexxual anecdote?   XsX

MR: issssss there ssssomebody that needsss taken care of?

GC: ~*whatever 1t 1s 1t can’t be t00 1mp0rtant 0r the stars w0uld have warned me!*~     ~u~

TC: calm your asses down, FUCK.

TC: I just need ONE OF YOU who ain’t that busy.

TC: our little imperial freak got himself the thought to bring a rust of his to use on some empire bullshit.

TC: TAKE HER ON BOARD and FUCKING all.

TC: pain in the ass as he is I STILL NEED HIM IN ONE PIECE and his MUCKBLOOD not torn up to bits.

MR: >:oS

TC: shut your slippery whore mouth, Inquirer.

MR: >:oY

TC: I will beat your ass.

AD: I’m up in the high places, behind the axxess wall…I can make it down if you’re all busy.

GC: ~*uuuuuugghhh a ***rusty*** th0ugh???? Really????*~

SD: I w I l l  d o  I t .

There’s a silent second.  You weren’t expecting Halore to jump in, for all you knew he was there.  Doesn’t talk much here, not even to the other schoolfeeders when you’re out of the chat.  You think he finds himself not welcome, which is a fucking shame but not your dish to fix.  He can deal with his own problems. 

TC: yeah?

TC: YOU GOT PROTECTIONS AS YOU NEED?

…okay but you’re still allowed concern.  Fucker all but lost his moirail.  Meenah is watching you type, looking all amused at you.

SD: s h e  I s  t a k e n  C a r e  o f  a n d  w I l l  n o t  b e  A l o n e  f o r  L o n g .

SD: a n o t h e r  o f  m y  S k I l l s  I s  t h a t  I  c a n  a l s o  Y e l l  v e r y  l o u d l y .

SD: a n y  o f  t h e m  t h a t  h a s  h a d  S c h o o l f e e d I n g  w I t h  m e  w I l l  k n o w  b e t t e r  t h a n  t o  s t I c k  A r o u n d .

TC: bitchtits. 

GC: ~*Stædfast, y0u b1g s0fty*~  *u~

SD: s h u t  u p , S u n g a z e r .

TC: SHUT UP SUNGAZER.

GC: ~*shutt1ng up*~

GC: ~*testy*~

AD: Stædfast will handle it then, thank you brother.

MR: well have fun?

MR: ((sssssarcassm?))

AD: Hate of my life, xxmear unrendered #77 on your “sarcaxxm” and shove it up your chute.

MR: >;oY  <3<

TC: fucking hell HOW MANY GODDAMN TIMES do I have to tell you to TAKE THAT SHIT TO PRIVATE MESSAGES.

SD: y o u  a r e  a l l  a c t I n g  l I k e  W r I g g l e r s.

SD: I  s u p p o s e  I t   I s  n I c e  t o  s e e  t h a t  n o t h I n g  h a s  c h a n g e d  s I n c e  l a s t  t I m e  I   j o I n e d .

GC: ~*yeah except the new name wh1ch 1s AWES0ME!!!!*~

SD: w h a t  n e w  N a m e .

SD: o h .

MR: lmmfartfo?

AD: What the fxxx. X….X

MR: ((laughing my motherfucking assssss right the fuck off?))

AD: Lame.  XnX

MR: >;oY

TC: holy shit THESE ARE THE SCHOOLFEEDERS OF THE IMPERIAL HOLY FLEET.

TC: TAKE A GOOD LOOK, holy ones, that’s a REAL GOOD JOKE you made there.

GC: ~u*

AD:  =….X

MR: >;oY

TC: goddammit.

SD:  ; o ]

TC: I fucking hate EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU.

MR: Kinky?

terrorizingCachinnation [TC] has terminated this group.

You sit up off Meenah, who snorts and kicks you in the ass on your way off. 

“Gotta get back to the fleet before our little candyblood dipshit gets himself ripped up and used like paint,” you say, and she raises her eyebrows.  “Got a feeder on the way down to get the kin under control, but if he’s got somebody in there he’ll want for me to be there and doing work.”

“Whale then, get right on that.”  She sits back and waves you off like she wasn’t just chewing on you and her top ain’t pulled half down.  “Hur-ray up.  If your clownfishes hurt my bab I’mma hold them respawnsible and I know you hate when I fuck up your clowns.”

You know she will, too.  You yank your clothes in order, turn and take to your heels.

\--

When you get to the ship a couple hours later, they all come crowding in to see you like usual.  Some got news, some got petitions, some just want a look at you.  You humor and allow, and cuff a couple of horns and growl when they shove at each other, and eventually you get to the bigger kin at the back, waiting patient for their turns.

“Well?”

One of them looks at the other and back up at you.  “…Vantas took the shitblood up to the decks,” he says, sulky.  “Feeder Travye told at us that was what you wanted?”

You grimace and they laugh a little, share the joke.  _Who would_ want _a rust on board_?

“I’m allowing it,” you make clear.  “For now.  We’ll see what she got to yield to the fleet, and if nothing else she got a body full of blood.  We’ll see, kin.  We will motherfucking see.”

“Yes lord,” he says, and they step on back, duties done.  Speaking of duties…

You pull out your palmhusk as you walk away from the crowd, and look down at your list of folks on the line.  There he is. 

terrorizingCachinnation [TC] began trolling  sacredDidaction [SD]

TC: thanks, brother.

You log back off again before he can answer, kind of like a coward but more (you figure) like a cagey  motherfucker as don’t want to mix up his quadrants.  You don’t need him back in your life past how he is as a feeder and an old friend.  That’s the distance you plan at keeping. 

You figure you know where Vantas will go, and you get proved right when you get up to the floor of the feeders’ blocks and open up the door to the work-block you and Karkat have been working in the past long weeks.  He’s standing there in his uniform, shoulders all square and hands behind his back, and there’s a big round-bodied shape by him with a _fuckload_ of hair.

The shitblood is taller than Karkat by a bit, round in the face and curvy-soft like Meenah with bounce-tissue over muscle.  Big, big dark red-brown eyes and big curving-round horns that set something off at the back of your head.  You saw those somewhere, some old picture.  God knows and nobody fucking cares.

“Is this it?”  You look at Karkat, not at her.  “What kinda good you figure this is going to do?”

“We’re almost due for him to come back, if they’re keeping their usual schedule,” Karkat says, and gives you that cute little glower.  “ _Aradia_ is going to stick around with us until he does, since he usually tries to come and talk to us.”

“Yes!” says the rustblood, and looks at you with no fucking fear in her eyes.  She’s uniformed up like a full fleet ghost-whisperer, and against your better judging your regard for her ticks up a notch or two.  She’s young for that job.  He pan must be flowing right the fuck over with power if they put her in charge of the ghosts and haunts so early.

“Psychopomp of Her Condescension’s Ship _The Most Diplomatic impact,_ ” she says, and smiles with her weird, flat mud-sucker teeth.  “—although of course since the name is written in East Alternian that’s only the _polite_ way to translate the name.  I have a deal I need to make with you.”

You almost look to either side and behind but no, she really is looking right to you and you gotta figure the words are meant for you too.  What a cheeky little _fucker._  

“Dirtbloods don’t make deals,” you say, and Karkat glares at you.  You don’t give a fuck.  “Highbloods give orders, _you follow those fucking orders._ ”

“Yes,” she says.  “It does go like that, doesn’t it?  Kind of weird.  But I’m going to negotiate with you anyway, because I have something you want.”

“ _Aradia_ ,” Karkat says, really quiet and fast, and by the (hilarious) shock on his face he didn’t know she was going to pull this shit when she saw you.  You almost have to smile.  Almost. 

“I’m a psionic,” says the little shitblood, and looks at you with eyes fucking _fearless._ “That means after I’m done showing off my powers talking to Gamzee, you could easily have me yanked down to your engine room to juice up your boat just to get to him faster!”

Your teeth grind.

“Or I could do it NOW.”

“You won’t find any psychics as good at communing with spirits as I am, so even if you did that it wouldn’t benefit anybody,” she says, and she doesn’t look like the threat fazes her at-fucking- _all._   You’re good at reading fear.  This girl has none.  “…especially not Gamzee.”

Hearing his name makes something electric happen to your posture column.  For the first time, whatever changes—face or bearing or just some thinkpan shit—you feel the barest thread of fear run through her.  She knows the reminding has put you in a killing mood.  Knows you _do not fucking tolerate._

 _“_ And I do want to help him,” she says.  “He was really very sweet to me!  But I don’t want to sacrifice my life for him!  I have a lot of things I want to do with it.  I want helming immunity.”

You grit your fangs together hard, think it over.  On the one hand, you can’t be all just _bowing_ to some lowblood trash.  But she’s got you at bad odds and she knows it.  But again…you can’t know she’ll be able to help in the end at all, and then you’d have given over some valuable shit and with no return.

You turn your head to where Gamzee’s standing, see if—

He’s not there. 

You knew he was, as sure as if you caught a glimpse from the corner of one ganderbulb—he was _there,_ wasn’t he? Megido looks where you looked, and turns her head a little to one side.

“You look terrible,” she says.

“Oh!  I’m sorry to hear that,” she says.

“Yes, I do,” she says.  “And I can hear you a lot more clearly than I thought.  That’s not good.”

“Well, it might be something I’ve never seen or heard of before,” she says.  “Or it might mean they’re hurting you.  That whatever this is, you’re not meant to do it and you’re, well…dying.”

You knew it.  Knew it already, know that he did too from his last scripture before he left you last time, but still your whole body turns ice and poison.  Karkat sits up so straight and scared and sudden and you can almost hear Gamzee in your head, breathing fast, see his eyes wide.  Because it’s true, or because imagining, because you wish him there so bad?  Fuck if you know, god _god, FUCK._

“This is painful, for you?”

“Oh.  Well, you’re quite good at it, all things considered.  Most psychics don’t—”

“No.  Well, yes.  I guess so!  This is uncharted territory as far as I know.”

“You don’t feel all that far away though!  I could tell if your body was close by, and it’s not but it is closer than I thought it would be!  Closer than the ship I came from, for—”

“Gamzee?”  Your voice took a while to be found—when it comes out it’s more sharp than you mean it to be in front of the dirtblood—it’s fear.  There’s fear on your tongue and buzzing through your horns and bitter in your voice. 

Megido turns to glance at you.

“He’s there,” she says.  “He’s not like a ghost, quite, which is strange! He’s…unclear, at the place which is the opposite of physical edges but is actual edges on the inside.  I think that’s probably because he’s still alive and has a body somewhere! If he were a ghost I could call him up so you could all see him…but I think if I tried that now it might kill him, so I won’t do that!”

At the words _kill him_ you went tight and tensed with fear.  You breathe and keep yourself in hand.  He’s alive.  He’s alive and she can _talk_ to him, talk to him direct, face to face. 

…maybe.

“How do I know you’re talking to him?” you say, and this time it comes out flatter and clearer, less fearful and pathetic.  “Tell me how he got the scar on his shoulder.  Ask him.”

She turns and blinks slow.  “You heard him.”

There’s silence for a long moment, the longest and coldest and emptiest in as far as you can remember.  Then Megido nods and turns back to you.

“…you were the first thing that touched me,” she says, slow like she’s repeating it back, and your pusher aches from beating so hard, you ain’t breathing and can’t remember why you should.  “The first thing…that hurt me.  I wanted to remember that.”

“Fuck,” you say, and you sit because you’d rather that than fall.  “ _Fuck._ ”

“He’s going away again,” says Megido sharply.  “Gamzee, try to make them understand they’re hurting you! Try not to let yourself drift off—if they keep—Gamzee?”

She stares for a second—you stay silent, still, waiting, and then she slumps down and closes her eyes. 

“He’s gone.”

\--

You come out of the dark like coming up from deep water, snap up from where you lie, gasp in air and slump back panting.

You _talked_ to them. And not just slow and painful through verses and riddles, but Aradia looked at you where you aren’t and heard you when you couldn’t speak.  And she said you could be felt and she said you were _close_ and—

And she told you you were dying.  Not just that they would kill you somenight, that you would die at their hand when they had no need of you, but that this now is killing you.  That what they force you to do is bringing you low like poison, and fast.

You knew already, you could feel it. You’re weak and only getting weaker the more they force you back out of your pan without a chance to rest between.  Your body gets thinner.  Your thoracic cage juts out like your bones want to get away from what shit they do to your body.  You come up faster from their doses every time they let you rest, but rests are grown less and less and less since the day you screamed at them, and you’re left no time to heal.

And even worse all up in your thinkpan you got thoughts and doubts and whispers of blasphemies you’ve said, and a motherfucker can’t just get on his forgetting about shit like that.  You’ll carry that for the rest of your life.  You bowed when they told you bow.  They said _prophesy_ and you made like to confess their messiahs to them, as if they were real and you’d seen them.  You should have let them kill you, martyr you.  You should let them feed this shit to you until your thinkpan boiled and black took you over for the last time, rather than keep on speaking wicked unfunny noise like you have.  It eats at you.  Guilt sinks you.

But the ones you love are getting their search on for you, and hope has found its way back into you and you don’t want to die.  You were despaired and lost but now all of a sudden there’s a reason you could be found again.  The tiniest point of bright I the dark, far off, that there might be a…

…miracle.

The hope hurts almost worse than the despairing did.  But it also brings parts of your pan to life again you didn’t notice dying off.  Thoughts.  A slightest twinge of planning, a hint of a way forward.  Something you heard in a scripture feed one time, _if you’re in a place to use pity against your enemies…_

You got sway here, for all you’re chained up.  You got the power to make them grateful for your slightest kind word, to make them cringe and shake at your rebuke, a motherfucker couldn’t ask for more power while he’s locked up like dead meat.  You can pull strings on these motherfuckers.  They’ll be thirsty for a sweeter word now you snapped at them, right?  If you get lucky, blessed enough that the next to come in ain’t the cruel fucker in charge, you’d bet you can work them. 

You think about brother Uderak, asking his questions, making himself small, like the answers don’t mean shit to him, just asking, like…you think about Karkat, how he’s grown now, snapping and yelling when he needs it to push what he wants out of a fucker who don’t want to help him.  You think about Kurloz, hurting when he wants to like his words are knives, hurting so it pushes for what he wants, hurting and cutting and making things clear.

You think.

You change from hoping back to despairing again so many times waiting for them to come back that you can’t even start at counting all of the times up.  _Why fucking_ humiliate _your self to them if you won’t be found?_ One half your pan whispers, and _they could still find you you could still help them find you you could be with them you could LIVE_ cries the other one at you, stupid and young and small.  You could live.  You could _live._

  Just talk, talk they don’t figure they have to hide.  _Talk._   That’s how best you hurt them and that’s how they hurt themselves, you’re going to bring them down on their own stupid, blasphemous words like a knife.

It’s like interrogation.  Just like interrogation, right?  You had schoolfeeding, you _learned_ shit, what can you do here?

_Pick the weak point._

Not hard.  You can’t go at their leader, but there’s one much closer, quieter, softer; the one who takes care of you and wipes your face and feeds you when you come back to your body sometimes.  He’s got a weakness for you.  He looks back and worries at you when you snap at them.  _Pick the weak point._   He wants to take care at you, loves the times you don’t turn away and lives for you speaking a kinder word.  You think on how you feel when a feeder who talks to the whole class harsh and looks kind on you. 

It’s okay.  It’s fine, it’s okay.  You don’t— _want_ to gentle down your anger, don’t want to pretend to be sweet and kind, even to him who hasn’t fucked with you as much as some others have, but you can hurt them better this way than screaming at them. 

And you want them to _hurt._

You have to send up a prayer when someone finally comes back to you, because it ain’t the piece of trampled shit who calls himself their leader and dictates at you when you suffer.  It’s the brother who tries at caring for you, small and creeping with fear, hands held up and back bent.  He avoids to look in your eyes like you’re some high-up fucker who’d meet his stare and call it disrespect.  He bares his neck to you and turns away his horns like you, chained up and aching on your soft rags, could hurt him.

Well, you figure, as you think about his face when you screamed your judgment on them, he’s not wrong.  And if he fucks up, if he tries to touch you pale, you will.  You got words you could say to him that you figure he won’t want to hear.

But for now…

“…brother Immortal…?”

You turn your head and know he sees you’re exhausted because hell fucking yeah you’re exhausted.  God, is it day or night even?  It’s stopped meaning shit to you.  What the fuck do you say to him?  Where do you start.

“… _wh’happened_?” you say, and it’s not hardly an act when you wheeze in a breath and cough it out—he fumbles out water and holds it out, not sure—when you strain for it he slumps relief and helps it to you.  Messiahs but that’s good.  You’ll never drink again without a word of thanks for it. 

“You…” he fidgets around.  “…y-you were…you had a…a harsh time, brother.”

You gotta hold in the first urge you get, which is to laugh until you pass out.  Groan instead at how the rest of you aches. 

“More water?”

You think of your brother with the sharp slitherbeast eyes, and make your face a smile.  “… _miss the fleet elixir,_ ” you say, hoarse, and it’s not a lie.  He smiles back bigger at the sight of the smile. 

“We could get you some,” he says.  “Could steal some off there for you, wouldn’t be more than hours.”

Holy shit, you’re closer than you figured to dare.  But you’re not on the fleet.  Means they shouldn’t search the church ships for you, they need to check their airspace.  Holy fuck, you totally just did that. 

“ _Yeah_ ,” you say, and hold up a hand—shit, it drops again a second later, you got less in you than you thought.  “—here— _water_.”

He gives you more, and you drink until you’re pretty motherfuckin’ sure you’ll drown.  Motherfucking _praise,_ hallelujah.  That’s the best thing you ever tasted.

You got to get food.  Water.  Stall them, keep them from drugging you till you got more to tell Kurloz and Karkat.  (Keep them from drugging you till you can come back from it without getting sucked down in that white light and not coming back up—)

“I’m…hurting, brother,” you say, and he looks at you like it’s a secret, like he wouldn’t have ever guessed.  You think about bright green haze and soft not-caring of your wrigglerhood, sink back in it and don’t think about the words coming from you as your weakness goes bare in front of him.  “… _can’t breathe.  ‘M always cold.  I won’t make it to see the church._ ”  Whose church?  Well that’s up for him to pick, and you know by how he looks so sad he thinks of the wrong one.  You said _church_ , not backward-ass blasphemous _cult._   You let him think wrong.

“We try at caring for you,” e says, and he reaches out and touches you.  You’ll not tolerate that.  You snap your fangs.

“ _Watch your fronds._ ”

He pulls back, eyes open wide, hurt.  “Y-yes, brother, sorry—”

“ _Not for your hands,_ ” you say, as strong as you can.  “All of you—too motherfuckin’ easy to lay hands on me.”

He bows his head down. 

“… _a doctorturer, biggest brother?_ ” he sounds quiet and submitting at you, bowing to the power you don’t have.  Feels good.  Feels _so fucking good_.   If he wasn’t such a good way in, such a good weak spot to dig your way in, you’d be cruel as fuck just for the freedom of it. 

“ _Yeah,_ ” you say, and he relaxes a little bit just to hear he’s done something you don’t hate him for.  _Bare me your neck and I’ll rip you open_ , you think, and it takes you a second too long to remember that’s not scripture at all.  Kurloz’s sermons are all banging around up in your pan too, pretty words and sharp, bright pictures.  _Walk yourselves on to your burning holy end, you who stand against me, mercy has run out, honk_ honk motherFUCKER _—_

“ _Thanks_ ,” you say, and hope the rough choke of your breath can hide how your voice cracks on the lie in the words.  “…L—little brother.”

He gasps in a breath.

“I-I’ll talk to them,” he says, brighter and louder, lit up joyful.  “I’ll tell them, I promise, I’ll go right now, I—”

“Food.”

He stops and settles down again.  “—oh.  Fuck, I…sorry.”

You eat and eat and drink, never quite enough but more than you’ve had, and you’re trying to work your pan around to a question that might make him whisper where you are, but then you twist an arm and the cuffs rub hard and rough on raw places and the pain hits you a hundred times over.  You gasp out a noise you can’t control and black hits you again.

\--

They give you extra the second you wake up.  Of fucking course they do, you have just enough of a time to think a couple choice holy words of damnation on them in your thinkpan before the light pulls you down and out and far away. 

It’s a rough one.  You end up shattered up in the insides, thrown place to place to place, harder and sharper and more unbearable than it has been.  You try to tell at whoever you see what you know now, but they don’t hardly even have time to notice you before you’re gone again.  Lasts long enough you go almost numb.  Not numb so you stop feeling every single thing too much, but numb so you can’t scream and struggle any more.  When you come back it’s just long enough to feel your body jerk and snap around and tremble and wheeze before you go again.

The last thing you see before you wake up is strange and far off and clear, and it’s you.  You see you.  Eyes rolled up and back, blood from your nose and tears and sweat and spit and your face is just a fucking mess.  You see yourself whine and struggle for air and shake and shake and shake.

You’re a wrecked body, you think, and you know it would hurt if you had anything left to hurt with.  No wonder they see you like nothing but flesh.

It’s endless floating ages before you come back to yourself, and when you do there are hands on you.  You’re about to try to find a shred of strength in you to throw them away, but something stops you.

The hands are warm. 

You roll your head into it, blurred and hazy, and groan at how cold you are.  Warmer than the other purples have been to you even, for all you been frozen and broken apart so long. 

“This is…” the voice isn’t familiar, but the sound kicks up more out your numb pan—warm hand.  New voice.  They brought in a lowblood. 

“Make your looking-at _quick_ , dirtblood,” growls a voice more familiar, and the hands on you twitch.  God but you’re thirsty again.  Can’t ever drink enough water. 

“Wow,” says the voice.  “You’ve done a number on this one.  He’s…not in good shape.”

“Explain.”  The harsh voice.  The man with the eyes made of needles of ice.  You flinch that time, remember how he looks at you, the horror he can put to you with his voice, his fucked up chucklevoodoos, but his voice isn’t turned on you this time, and there’s none of that unbearable hum to it. 

“I don’t know what the fuck you did to him.”  Hands move over you.  Cold metal, even colder than your freezing skin, touches over your pusher.  Hand jostles you.  “Hey!  You.  Breathe in and out.” 

You growl, but it’s all weak and thready and pathetic. 

“Eh, close enough.”  They move the cold metal, thump at your thorax, and get another growl out of you.  “Wow, shit.  Okay, well he’s got an infection in at least one aeration sponge.   Come on, would you just take a deep breath already?”

You find against all else you think of them, you like this lowblood better than the painted faces around you, and that aches but you feel better with their touch on you, their eyes looking at you like a sick troll instead of a holy relic.  You breathe deep.

“Good.”  They move it again.  “Again.”

Feels so stupid fuckin’ good.  They talk right to you.  They look at you.

“Your pump-biscuit is doing some _crazy shit,_ boss,” says the lowblood, and they sound less formal, less talking-to-highblood than before.  Like they’re getting their talk on to you. 

“You’ll talk to the Second Coming with _respect_ ,” a heretic growls at them, and you open your eyes enough to turn at who talked and snarl.  They pull back.

“ _Hey, thanks,_ ” says the warmblood, and their voice is soft enough like you can’t hardly hear, soft enough none of the others must be able to hear.  They raise up their voice again.  “…I was just _saying_ , his pump-biscuit is beating like he just ran a mile, he’s…” another cold metal touch—a soft noise.  “…at least as cold as your average violetblood…he’s wheezing like a motherfucker and I’m pretty sure he’s having muscle spasms.”

Doesn’t mean much to you, but their tone is quiet and hard.  They tap your arm sharp and sudden; your hand jerks out of your control. 

“See that?  Not good.” 

The heretics murmur and mumble discontent.  The warmblood leans back over you.  “… _open up a ganderflap for me,_ ” they say, quiet again, just to you.  “ _Both if you can, boss._ ”

You get your eyes open—teary and wet and hurting.  So fucking bright.  The light hits you like knives in the pan and you groan and crumple back closed again, shaking at the feeling of it, how it chops right at your thinkpan through your eyes.  The warmblood hums real quiet, thinking, then sits up.  “Honored highbloods,” they say, and their voice is sugary-sweet all sudden-like.  “Could we dim the lights?  I’m afraid they’re painful for the…prophet’s…eyes.”

“ _…do it,_ ” you get out, harsh and sharp on a breath, cutting off the complaints.  “Do it.”

The lights go dimmer.  The pain eases a little.  You can open up your eyes. 

The warmblood has got big, dark eyes, yellow around the black of them.  Their face is round and soft and maybe a couple sweeps older than you, already showing lowblood age around the edges, and they grin when you open up your ganderflaps and look at them.

“Good.”  They reach in their sylladex.  Talking soft still.  The cult is all around you, but you keep your eyes on them.  First friendly hand, first friendly eyes you’ve seen face to face in weeks and you didn’t realize what a hunger you had for it.  “Bright light.  Stay looking straight ahead.”

You stare ahead—the light hurts like fuck but you want to do good for them and you do what you’re told.  They hiss real soft under their breath.

“Well there’s part of your problem,” they say.  “Your eyes are taking forever to react to light.  Goddamn.”

“Meaning?”  Leader of the cult.  Your hands jerk— _fight him push him off, get him away_ , fuck—!

“ _Hey now._ ”  Soft and sharp, so quiet.  It’s not Karkat, it’s not pale, but it distracts.  Makes you breathe.  They raise up their voice and their hand presses down on your thorax where they’re leaning, soft and warm and pushing-present, something you can focus at.  “Meaning his pan isn’t listening to his body when it says HOLY SHIT THAT’S A LOT OF LIGHT.  You’re overstimulating him.”

“His _visions_ overstimulate,” says a sister, quiet, resenting. 

“Well then, you might consider making everything else _less_ of an overstimulation,” they say, still so sweet and yielding, perfect lowblood.  “If my suggestions could be of assistance, of course.”

Murmurs, quiet.

“What are you giving him to eat?”  They press one more time before they stand up, and you can keep in the whine that wants to rise in your throat as they pull away because of that soft, final touch.  “Just water to drink?  Do you have any Gatorage.”

They move away for a spell.  The yellowblood is looking over what they give you, talking and talking, and the soft far-off noise of their voice makes you float a little.  _Friend,_ your pan says, all blurry.  _Mmmmm friend good a friend’s here it’s okay while they’re here you’re okay friend a friend—_

“—my advice,” the yellowblood says, fading back in, and you get your eyes open to see them again.  They’re so small standing by the purples around them.  There’s a tag in one ear—a sign, you figure, and you burn the shape into your pan the best you can.  Colored strings around their horns, the kind like Karkat says a wrigglerhood quadrant would put there before they got adult hands to make quadrant signs for real.  They got a jacket on like Karkat’s that he wears when he comes from his work.  You don’t want them to be done with you, don’t want them to _go_ —

“Where you headed back to, dirtblood?”  soft and almost friendly now, but you can hear cruel cold under the words and his voice still makes you shake.  Makes you want to run and makes you want to put his throat in your claws and squeeze and _squeeze—_ the yellowblood kneels down by you and puts their hands to a kit full of mediculler’s gear, packing away, and you jerk a hand and get your frond to touch their wrist.  They jump just the slightest touch, and you see them look up at you and you see that they’re warning you.  _Don’t say a word._

“Fleet,” they say a second late, and clean up their hands and you’d swear when they look down at you again, just a glance, you see one eye flick like a wink.  “Squad mediculler.  Not a bad job, but it’ll be better with what you’re paying—”

And then they jerk in place, like somebody hit them in the shoulder, and then they go still.  Kneel there still, staring down at their thorax and the metal point that’s gleaming in their flesh. 

“A-ah,” they say, and yellow blood drips hot against your bare thorax.  Your pusher stops dead as they raise up their eyes to you and there’s a question and a confusion and a _blame_ growing in their eyes.  “—hkkh—”

“ _Nhh,_ ” is all you can get out, and their hands find the point of the blade in them and their eyes go wide and then start to fade away.  Look at something far off.  “ _No._ No, nononono fuck _no_ —”

It can’t take them more than seconds to rattle and shake and fall away from their body entirely, but you look them in the eyes and it feels like sweeps.  You watch them despair in their last seconds, the only one here who was anything like really kind at you.  You watch them wheeze and bubble blood through mouth and nose, bright and yellow-gold.  You watch them go still and empty behind the eyes and when their head drops and their body gets limp and used up is when the words come back to you, the hate boils up strong again.

“What the— _fuck did you—_?!”  your voice breaks, your throat burns and itches, aches and you cough and cough until your thorax ain’t strong enough anymore, until there’s a fire all up in your motherfucking insides from how your thorax pulls tight around the noise.  “—why—?!”

“For your protection.”  The sword is pulled free.  The acolyte who holds it shakes the blade with a sneer like the yellow on it is a cause for disgust.  “Dirtbloods got no loyalty to anything but what as makes their simple little lives easier.  Would’ve sold us out the second  it got back to fleet.”

“Don’t—”

“It’s dead.”  Foot nudges at them—hurting and rage makes you snarl but they must take it for satisfaction at their bullshit because they don’t flinch at it.  “Ugh, it’s bleeding on everything.  Sister, you still got a coffin modus somewhere?”

“We can airlock it…”

You didn’t even know, never even had a name for them, but they cared for you and they might have led your loves to you and you can’t—fucking— _deal with this._   Your voice fails you, cracks into quiet whenever you try to shout, but that dead cooling body by your feet is more family to you than any other heretic paint-faced fucker around you and you mourn them like you would a brother or sister of the faithful.

“ _—looked at me,_ ” you say, and your voice stays with you so you raise it a little and you fix your eyes on the one with the sword and you hope she finishes it.  “—listened to me like—you fuckers never—why don’t you _listen to me—?!_ ”

“We do listen, highest!”  One of them says it from the back, and they sound so fucking _surprised._ “Your words are a blessing, you know that—”

“No, yyyyyou _don’t_ —!”  your voice goes broken at the edges and they turn down to look at you, more of them now, staring at you like they never saw you before.  “— _‘is this what you were brought up from normal troll from, kin?’_ ” scripture sits heavy on your tongue, copper and sweet like blood, and you see eyes go wider, meet yours.  For a second, you want to kill them and you want to save them and it _hurts._   “— _‘is this what our lords’—_ nnh—!”

A few start forward like they want to help you—you snarl like you’ll tear their fronds off and they flinch back. 

“Leave us,” says the harsh voice, but you’re already talking and they listen to you as much as they do him.  They listen even while they back away at his orders.

“— _I don’t_ want _you to_ touch _me, motherfucker,_ ” you say, and saying the words out loud you wanted to say so long is terror like a cold hand around your throat but you choke out through it anyway.  “ _Let me go or FUCKING KILL ME ALREADY!”_

“Brother—” they’re looking to the leader, looking to the one with the sharp eyes, and you look right at him and hope he sees the hate in you. 

“I need to speak to the prophet alone,” he says, and you let out the biggest, least funny laugh you ever laughed and the rest of them run and whisper and cover their ears, squeeze their eyes shut.

“Go on!” you snap after them as they run, and you pull at your cuffs and bare your teeth and don’t give a fuck that there’s a danger in his eyes because you see the _doubt_ in the ones who follow him.  Some avert and avoid and didn’t look at you as they went half-running to the door, some hide themselves from your snarls, but one or two look at you and you feel them see you the first time as a troll. 

The door slams shut, and you look at your torturer and show him your fangs.  “Get the _fuck_ on with it, motherfucker!  You know.”  You choke on the words, come back louder as he turns to you and starts to come for you, eyes on fire and fists closed tight with rage.  “—you _know_ you can bend a motherfucker to anything if you _hurt them long and hard enough_ COME TRY IT IF YOU—hkhh— _if you think you can make me_ bow _for you again—_ ”

“It’s not _me_ that you’ll bow to,” he hisses, and you try to sit up and go for him, try to snap at him—he puts a foot on your thorax and shoves you down and presses until your aeration sponges can’t take in air.  “You’ll bow to your _messiahs._ You have _one more chance,_ you— _spoiled wriggler_.”

 _Shove it up your waste chute,_ you want to say, but you can’t get air and all you can do is wheeze and snap your fangs with how bad you want his blood splattered up the walls. 

“If you refuse the grace offered to you again, you will _not like the outcome,_ ” he says, and presses down again, hard, hard enough you feel yourself _creak._   Pain-pleasure-white-black.

You come back sucking in air, coughing and shaking and thinkpan all set spinning, and the room is dark, and he’s gone.  Fuck.  _Fuck._   You got mad, you lost it, and now if he won’t listen to you when you play at weakness it’s your own motherfucking fault. 

You don’t want to look and see if the body is still cooling by your feet, but you can still smell the blood.  You have to keep trying, keep getting to them, but thinking of yourself fawning and whimpering at the ones you hate so _fucking_ bad makes you taste acid at the back of your elocution flap.  If the death of the kin by your feet did you any good, it’s more time.  You’ll have time now.  You can plan later.  You stare up at the ceiling up high over you until dark gentles your pan to sleep again.

\--

When they come back next you’re ready for your lying, for the fakery of it.  What you’re not ready for is the black blood-drug they’re bringing with them.  You should have known better, you know and hate your stupid self for believing they’d listen to a yellow and spare you some suffering.  You look up past the kin with the drug and you see the leader look down at you with his cold eyes and know he’ll be hard on you if he can.  You gotta play this smart if you want the rest the yellowblood said you needed.

And then, just when you need to be here and now, your thinkpan blinks.  You see Karkat, just a blink, and then you come back and feel cold glass at your mouth and burning on your lips.  You jerk your head away, but some gets in your mouth and your eyes flash out white.  Shit shit _fuck_ you can’t _can’t_ you can’t—

“Wait—!”

Their leader looks over and back at you, and you have to talk quick, have to fight off the burn in your thinkpan, fuck you need to make them wait.  You need to rest, you can’t _breathe._

“ _Please,_ ” you get out, and they blur and burn at your eyes, white and grey.  “ _Too…c-can’t…_ ” It’s gotten even harder to get the air in—your aeration sponges feel broken.  You don’t feel hardly strong enough to move your lips.  “… _they’re…too bright,_ ” you lie, you fucking _blaspheme,_ and pray to truer gods these heretics will believe.  “ _I need—can’t—need rest…_ ”

Some fucker is asking questions at you but you don’t got the pan power to answer.  The words don’t make sense.  You blink and it lasts a minute, maybe more.  Can’t be too long; when you come back they’re arguing soft and near.

“Maybe we do need to…ease back,” one of them says, and you don’t have to act the whimper you let go, grateful and scared as fuck.  Voice is familiar.  “You heard the shitblood.  He isn’t yet barely adult, brother, he’s thinner by the day, and if he’s sick too—he lashes out like a scared wriggler, it’s to be expected, the battle for spiritual purity—”

“Then we feed him the food the shitbloods use to keep up their strength.”  You know who it is, and you crack a swelled-up eye open and try to growl but you got barely the air for it.  You’re gonna kill him.  You’ll fucking _kill_ him.  “It’s made to make up the difference, to keep their bodies running for times like this, we can’t slow down now.  Brother Immortal was said to be no more than _seven_ when the messiahs were born to him _,_ brother, and him strong enough to bear their holy presence _in flesh_ —”

“Trolls have grown weak,” argues another. “Through no fault of his own is he too easily broken to take the weight of communion so soon!  And he’s been taken again and again by the…the fallen lord in the greater cult, burning off of that blasphemy has to be a harsh thing—”

“Penance is always harsh.”

“Sister, consider verse on this, if he—”

“But direct to the Messiahs—”

“You say ‘taken’ like he didn’t spread his legs and beg for it—”

“Mind your fuckin’ tongue!”

“All the more reason he’ll be hurting in their presence, of course he lashes out!”

“Alright!”  It’s the harsh one again, cutting through the fighting.  You know he means only to bring his disciples back to him, that he’s getting them back to trust again.  A show of how he’s faithful too, how he wants you healthy, of fucking _course_ he does.  When you let your head turn you see them all gathered with their heads bent together, blurred and farther off than they are, like you’re watching through a long-ass tunnel.  Like they’re distant to you.  “One night. But I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we get through to our eternal lords sooner than later.”

Nods and murmurs.  Whispers.  You see him look past them, see him look at you sharp and judging, and you grin at him just a second and see him angry before he opens his mouth and says a bitter word that hums with power.  Your pan fights a second with the horror of his voice, and then you break and you’re gone again.

\--

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you’re dreaming. 

You don’t dream often—don’t really sleep much, okay, you don’t have the fucking time to spend hours of every day unconscious and useless—but when you do you almost always know.  Not that it fucking _helps._

Apparently, you’re dreaming you’re the emperor.

There are gold rings and bracelets and necklaces and clinking jewels all over you.  Red.  Bright, bright red.  You couldn’t dream you’re a fuschiablood, oh no, FUCK YOU KARKAT VANTAS says the universe YOU GET TO DREAM YOU’RE THE MOST LOOKED-AT TROLL IN THE GALAXY AND _STILL_ A FILTHY FREAKBLOOD. 

You are pretty fit though.  Taller and stronger than you are in real life, definitely, as far as you’ve got a real body that exists when you’re dreaming.  You might know you’re dreaming, but your thinkpan is still foggy and asleep and you have to struggle sluggishly to make sense of things as they happen.  You only have any part of your body as long as you’re looking at it.  When you’re not thinking about it, you might as well be a ghost or some kind of sentient breeze that jingles a lot.

You’re in a ship that’s the unholy offspring of the Dark Carnival and the Condescension.  Hallways you know painted in fuschia and sparkles and gold are now also splattered in blood of all colors.  Hallways you normally see dark and lit by hanging faygo bottles with lights in them have gold and bright red lanterns in among the cheap plastic.

 _Your imperial highness,_ says the servant by your elbow, and the other one bows to you.  _What is your pleasure today?_

“I’m not the emperor,” you say, as clearly and bluntly as you know how.  “Fuck.  Off.”

But they just bow and scrape and murmur _of course your lordship, forgive us for troubling you_.  Okay.  So there’s some kind of script here, and no matter what happens to your half they’re going to keep following theirs.

Might as well make the best of it.

“…get me my palemate and my kismesis,” you order the next lackey you see, in your best imperial tone, and it feels like a wriggler playing highblood in his block alone but it also seems to work.  She snaps blurrily to attention.  At least, that’s what your pan tells you she does.  She’s kind of hazy.  But she definitely seems more attentive.  Maybe you can make this dream actually _interesting._   “Actually—put my kismesis in the pailing chamber and tell him to strip.  He can wait for me.  Bring me my moirail.”

She must have either run off to do what you say or just kind of vanished into thin air because she’s not there any more.  You keep walking.  Crabdad chitters at you and you feed him some roe cubes.  There’s a painting of you on the wall looking bright and shiny and formal with imperial gold hung all over you.  Nepeta shows up for some reason, but she looks like Vriska.  You know she’s Nepeta though.  She offers to tell you a story, but you keep walking instead.  It’s nice.  It’s just…really fucking nice.  You could spend more dreams like this, instead of feverishly making up battle plans against enemies whose formations and plans make no sense and won’t stop instantaneously changing—

Gamzee is standing in front of you.

For a second he looks so goddamn _real._   Clear and true and—just— _real,_ just like he always did.  Then he turns and looks at you, and you can see right through him.  He moves in still snapshots, leaves smoke afterimages dissolving behind him. Looking away.  Looking toward you.  Blank and then surprised and then hurting and sad, one frozen moment after the other.  The dream lags and stutters as you try to reach for him.  Your hand brushes his arm and his skin where you touch him dissolves into smoke and ashes.  He’s hurt, your pan tells you, even though you can’t see any blood, any wounds.  He’s hurt and you can’t reach him to fix him.  You have to hold him.  He’ll die if you don’t.

 _“…best friend,_ ” he says, and tries to smile and he looks so fucking _sad._   _“…miss you.”_

 _“Stay,_ ” you say, and it’s the only order you’ve given in this whole stupid charade that you actually mean, that you _need_ followed, but he’s already shaking his head.

“ _You’re a dream, Karkat,_ ” he says, and he looks right at you and your pusher is beating so hard in your chest you might be dying.  “ _Brother, you’re just a dream._ ”

You wake up choking on a breath that comes out a thick, wretched sob.  Your chest hurts, your throat burns.  When you try to shove yourself upright, your hand sinks in thick sopor slime—you’re in a recuperacoon.  The slime is thick and vivid—high-grade.  The chitin is heavy  and there’s more than one set of deep claw-marks in the walls around you.  Classic highblood cocoon.  You think you know where you are. 

When you sit up and look out, you see Kurloz’s block, dark and silent.  It’s owner isn’t there, and the emptiness feels crowded.

You turn your back on it, and go back to sleep.

\--

You wake up from dreams and pictures you can’t recall, take a breath and you can look around with your eyes, and your thinkpan still aches something fierce and you’re hungry, yeah, and thirsty, but it’s not like it was where you _needed_ , where you would _die_ if mercy wasn’t granted.  You sit up a little, and then recall they’re waiting only for your recovery and let out a groan you only just barely have to act up and let yourself shudder back down.  Your minder makes soft sounds; you know their voice now as the one who pushed for this rest, who wanted to let you heal up, and you hate every touch but at the same time you are so grateful at them for their mercy you can’t but turn your face into the hand on your head and purr.

He pulls his hand away with this sharp little gasp like you hurt him.

“ _…did it hurt?_ ” He asks, and you think on Kurloz starting up when Aradia looked at you, on Karkat sitting pale and shaking in the corner.  “ _…seeing them, I mean, did it hurt?_ ”

“ _I wanted to—fuckin’_ die _,_ _it hurt so bad,_ ” you get out, and feel filthy as his hand traces round your cheek over and over, shooshing in all but sound.  “ _It was k…killing me, I…_ sorry…”

“No, lord!”  his voice is painful-sweet, his hand is gentle and you hate how it feels so fucking nice and Karkat sits hunched and small and scared behind your eyes.  “No, b…brother.  You’ve done more than any of us ever could.  Brother Uumbrage is just…he wants this real strong, y’know, don’t mean any harm to you.  We’d never want that.”

_Brother Uumbrage._

You have a title.  The victory tastes like blood on your tongue, feeds the hate and the courage, makes you want to snap at him.  _And yet you fucking_ hurt _,_ you want to say, _and yet motherfucking hell but you torture and torment—_ you keep your mouth shut, and play up the sounds that want out of you.  Helpless noises that feel like you baring your throatstem, broken noises, wriggler noises you haven’t made in sweeps, and as he keeps touching and petting at you, he keeps talking too.

You shudder under his hands, and you listen.

\--

Gamzee doesn’t come back for two straight nights.  The line goes dead, nobody reports to you, nobody gets so much as a glimpse.  You haven’t been away from Kurloz’s side—he hasn’t been away from Aradia—since the last message came through.  You can see it’s wearing on both of them, although Aradia deals with the stress by being flippant and cheeky and Kurloz deals with the stress by being very quiet and occasionally pummeling things.  You’ve just gotten through distracting Kurloz with an argument about empire policy and you’re sitting in relatively peaceful silence when all of a sudden a voice breaks the silence.

 “Kurloz,” says Aradia.  “They dosed me again.”

You and Kurloz both snap upright.  Aradia has her eyes open, but they’re looking somewhere far away. 

“I don’t know how long I can stay this time, they didn’t…” she frowns.   “…didn’t…give me much and  I have so much shit to tell at you.  Gamzee, focus.  You’re really faint.”

“Anything new?”  Kurloz presses, and Aradia opens one eye to give him a look.

“Give him a second,” you say, and it comes out a snap.  “He’s trying!”

“I _know,_ motherfucker!” 

 “Uumbrage.”

Your thinkpan stutters in shock, thrown out of its train of thought.  Kurloz’s brow knots.  “What about him?”

“You know him?”  He ignores you.  Goddammit.  “K—ssssir, don’t you fucking _ignore_ me—”

“Karkat shut up,” Aradia snaps, and frowns, turning her head back and forth like she’s trying to find the source of a sound almost too faint to hear.  “…Uumbrage.  He…gives orders.  Holds…sway.”

“But he ain’t fuckin’ _church,_ ” Kurloz spits, and the venom in his voice is way more than you would expect, even now.  His lip is curled into a sharp sneer.  “Our caste and color but not our ways, he wears the holy paint as a mask to hide his face for the court salt-lickers!”

“I know.”  Aradia is speaking faster now, eyes still shut—for a moment, her voice deepens and there’s a seaside lilt to her voice.  For a moment, she sounds almost like… “—they sing his praises, how he—sacrifices his public face to only paint when he’s with the cult—

“It’s been his pleasure to play at seducing my faithful away,” Kurloz growls, almost more to himself than to any of you.  “—make pretend he wants to bring them imperial favor and then feed them doubt and heresy until they bare face and leave our fleet—oh, he’s a slick, sharp tongue but he wouldn’t fucking DO this—”

“Why not?”  Your heart is beating faster now, you don’t remember standing but you’re on your feet.  “—he would have survived the last purge you did, wouldn’t he?  You never looked outside of the church fleet, he would have just hid away and saved anybody he could—what if he wasn’t seducing them away from your church, what if he was converting them to—”

“Why would he want to?”  Kurloz’s voice is shaking with rage now, rising—he doesn’t want to see it.  “The FUCK KIND OF MOTHERFUCKIN’ PURPOSE WOULD HE HAVE FOR THAT?!  Fucker’s a slinking little motherfuckin’ bitchboy, little cowardly stain of _filth_ , he’d not stick his neck out like this!”

“He…councils caution always,” Aradia says, and you know by the hesitance and the pitch of her voice it’s Gamzee talking.  “Always caution, he won’t…let me rest.  Desperate.  Takes the water and food away, my…face…when…if I don’t…” she stops, brow furrowing.  “—you’re getting fainter.”

Kurloz makes the most awful sound, almost a furious snarl, but tight with desperation and fear—the look on his face when Aradia said _takes the water and food away_ was a perfect echo of the jolt of disbelieving fury that snapped through you like a lightning bolt.  His hands are shaking.  “We’ll find you,” he says, and his voice is shaking and it’s awful, to hear the fear in his voice when you need him stronger than ever.  “We’ll fucking _find you._ ”

“Gamzee says there’s something you need to say to Uumbrage,” says Aradia, eyes shut, face slack with concentration.  “…their hands were—oh.  No, sorry—okay.  ‘… _fierce were their hands, with claws and…godly might’…_ Gamzee you need to be really clear or I can’t hear you, I’m sorry but that’s just how it works!  Um…’The Raging—’ no?  Oh.  ‘ _…messiah raging spoke and said_ …’”

Kurloz watches her as she recites the snatch of scripture, eyes burning, and you know he’s going to remember every word.  How could he fucking _not_? 

“Come find me,” says Aradia, and you can feel the echoes of it in your brain.  _Come find me COME FIND ME come find come find find me come find—_

“Uumbrage is onboard the Condescension,” you say, and feel a slow burn start at the base of your skull.  _I don’t believe you_ have _a moirail, Vantas._   That bastard.  That dirty _motherfucker!_   “Let’s go.”


	26. Let's Be Destroyers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karkat's squad is almost entirely fantroll versions of characters from a different series, because I needed background trolls and slipping those guys in made me laugh. ;D Not a major detail, just a fun fact! 
> 
> Man this chapter was SO fun to write, even if it took me forever. Enjoy! UwU

Uumbrage is away on affairs unknown when you get to the ship, and Meenah’s got fuckers cleared out for rooms around and locked his door so nothing gets in or out.  You key in your code and step in with Karkat on your heels, and half of you expects to find Gamzee there and then but he’s not there.  All you find there is endless glitter and shine.  And his quadrants.

He’s got three trolls locked up in his block—he has no need of auspistice or ashen toleration.  They cower down from you.  Little trembling shitbloods, small and delicate.  Underfed.  It’s a thing you seen at banquets before, taking a pretty little shitblood as more pet than quadrant.  Piece of filth. 

They don’t scream when you come in, which is a touch unusual for your entrances—your entrances are motherfucking  _money_ , with horns and hair and paint like yours—but they stare up at you like you’re death come for them, and you’ll take that.  Karkat comes in after, and they look between the two of you and then down at their feet.

“We’re not here to kill you,” Karkat says, first off, and you bristle a little bit because hell, that wasn’t ever agreed.  He doesn’t look at you.  “As long as you cooperate.”

They look at each other.  Back at you two.

“What does that entail?” it’s a one in a choker with a purple heart set tight and high in it. 

“Means you answer all our questions about your  _owner,_  little shitblood,” you say, and she doesn’t even wince.  There’s a fear in her, but she shows no sign.  Her face makes no twitch or crack.  “And the cult he’s made from my faithful, and the sickness he’s wormed up in under our skin.  Means you fucking  _talk._ ”

She nods, just the once, and sits back again.

“So?”  Karkat presses.  “Talk.  Everything about Uumbrage and the church that any of you know.”

They’re silent.  Glance from one to the other like not a one of them wants to be the one to talk first.  Then, just when you’re about to pull some choice tools out and go to work, one of them speaks up.

 “… _he hates you_.”

It’s his palemate, if you can call them that.  She’s small, bruised up and starved-small.  You give her the hardest look you got in you.  “Fully  _aware,_ ” you say, and she hunches and bows her head, hands up to plead silent for mercy. 

“He talks,” says another, and he presses in closer to the moirail, side to side, puts an arm around them and looks up at you.  He has the look on him of…toleration.  He is the most scarred of them, the biggest and hardiest-looking and you think he must be what this fucker calls pitch.  “He talks about you all the time.  The church.  He talks about his plans.”

His eyes fix on yours, and there’s a fire left in them even for all the weary scarring over top. 

“Is he going to die?”

You bare all your teeth, and it can’t rightly or entirely be called a grin. 

“A  _hundred fucking times._ ”

The palemate looks up at you now, and for a second you think she’ll  argue, but you see for just a second instead a hate and satisfaction the like of a holy vendetta.  A passion and lust for blood.

“… _good,_ ” she says, so small.  “Can I be there?”

You can’t help it.  A laugh comes boiling up out of you and snaps out into the air.  You ain’t laughed in a long time.  Sound makes them all jump, but it’s not your pleasure to kill them now.  They amuse.  Satisfy even, as far as shitbloods might. 

“Little dirtblood,” you say, “—you and yours tell me what he tells you in the quiet and I‘ll hand you the knife and show you where to cut.”

“What does he want out of this?”  Karkat again, not amused like you, still urgent.  The same cold chains he’s put on himself that’s kept him under control with Gamzee gone keep his eyes sharp and wild now, his mouth full of questions while your blood already starts to boil up for the hunt and kill. 

“He wants you bowing to him, more than anything,” says the kismesis at you.  A shot of humor goes through him, his eyes all burning, a look you can even respect.  A dark joke.  “…I think he’d rather get off to that than me some days.”

“He doesn’t want a rivalry,” the palemate says, and you wonder how much she’s heard of you.  She doesn’t look to you, doesn’t talk to you.  Maybe she feels it safer that way.  “He wants him  _destroyed._   He has…a  _lot_  of ideas.”

“I don’t give a shit what he gets off to,” you say, but the back of your neck aches and prickles, thinking on his hate boiling for sweeps and sweeps and sweeps.  “I want to know where he hides what he has and wants to keep.  Where he’d put a kidnapped faithful?  Where’d he hide something he needed to see and know and keep safe?”

“Kidnapped…?”  the kismesis’s brow furrows up at you.  “—you mean that…’messiah’ kid he’s keeping locked up?”

All the air goes right out your sponge clots.  Karkat must see the look on your face, the prickling to tear the secrets right out their mouths  _faster more tell me everything_ —he steps up, urgent now, breaking through his own control.  “What are you talking about?  Where is he keeping him?”

“He never says too much,” says the moirail, and then cringes at how you and Karkat both bare fangs.  “—but!  But I know h-he’s on this ship!”

It goes to you like a bolt through your thinkpan.  Hits like a fist.  You stare and she keeps talking, faster now.  “—he was never on the church fleet.  He…Sir keeps his cult k…kin…down below.  The ship is massive, i-it’s a floating city…the shuttles connected alone are hive to as many trolls as—”

“On the  _Condescension_?”  Karkat sounds choked.  You can’t breathe.  Can’t move or speak.  Just stare at them.  “ _Where?!_ ”

“I don’t know!”  the palemate looks terrified at the way you snarl at that.  “Please, I swear that’s all I know!  I have no reason not to tell you whatever I can!”

“We only know what he told us,” the kismesis says, and puts an arm around the palemate again, pulls her closer like he’ll defend her from you.  “And that’s all I know either.”

“…but not all there is to know.”

You all but forgot the one in the heart choker was there.  She doesn’t look up to you, and you know by the still and silence to her that she’s not sure yet if she should keep on speaking.  She has a fear in her that comes not from you.

“Tell me what that means.”

She looks up and back down, and takes a breath in deep. 

“He told me—he never told the others, he…it took him sweeps and sweeps to trust me enough to tell me he had some kind of faith at all, let alone…” she glances at the other two—they look back at her, and there are looks to them you don’t give enough fucks to try decoding.  “…I…threw you both under the four-wheel-device a few times,” she says.  “I’m sorry.  I had to get closer to him somehow.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” you say over her, “— _where_.  Where on this miserable fucking fleet.   _WHERE ARE THEY.”_

“He has a shuttle.”  She touches her head, closes her eyes like she’s searching back for a memory.  “…racing shuttle, um…no weapons, no pods, nothing noticeable, but he goes there a lot and he’s always hinting about all his… _treasures_  there.”  She shudders a little.  “—he keeps the…the remains of his past quadrants there,” she says, sick and soft.  “… _I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where he keeps your…_ ’faithful’.”

\--

You’re bone-tired when you come back from talking through Aradia, from talking to Kurloz and Karkat and giving them all what you know.  You feel your mouth shape what you say as you say it in your head, and feel the hurt as your thorax strains to make the words—it’s too hard to make it happen only on the inside.   _Come find me,_  you say, over and over as you fade back away from them and come back to yourself lying in your rags of finery in the block that’s been your cell.   _Come find me, come find me, bring me back to hive, bring down the holy fire, come_ find me—

There’s somebody sitting by you.

There’s a brother sitting by you and he’s staring at you with eyes all wide and you know right that second you’ve fucked up and you can’t lie your way off this one.  You stare at each other a long second before he blinks, turns, starts to get up—you throw yourself up against the weight and pain of your body and dig your claws in his arm.  You’re weak but the torment’s been gentler these days and you’ve grown to tolerate and endure what they do to you and you hold on.

“ _No,_ ” you say, and you don’t have to force how your voice is hoarse and breathless, how you shake from holding him.  Where’s the one who takes care of you?  Fuck that, it’s good it’s not him.  Makes it easier, what you’re gonna do.  “No—brother—please, d’n…don’t go—”

“I have to tell—” what did he hear?  How much did you say?  Fuck fuck fuck—

“Please,” you say again, as soft as you know, and you still got strength but you let your grip go looser.  Smart.  You can do smart, right?  Be fucking  _smart_  about this you rot-panned fucking  _idiot._   “Please—”

You fall back, and he dives down and catches you.  Cold arms come around you and no wonder this fucker was with you, this fucker whose hands you know, whose fronds have always been on you too soft and in places unwanted, he wanted you so fucking  _soothed_  while they tortured you.  Piece of  _shit._

“… _took it in your hands,_ ” you croak, tiny and breaking in your burning throat, and your head fits in the bend of shoulder and neck, he holds you close like he wants to feel your breath on his choke.  He leans in.

“ _What, holy brother_?”

“ _You took your ticket in your fronds,_ ” you say, and the holy words seem to swell up your voice, you know what you have to do and you know—you fucking  _know—_ you’ll be forgiven.  “ _And.  You.  TORE._ ”

He has just a second to go “—wh—?” and then you jerk up toward him and your teeth sink in his throat.

Blood on your face, in your mouth and nose and pumping under his skin as he wails and struggles and pushes at you, but this is all that matters and you are not  _FUCKING LETTING GO_ , not now, this is no time and place for mercy and even when you close your eyes you think you feel the ground shake under you.   _Coming, he’s coming he’s coming he’s coming—_

You can’t tear his throat open but you tear gaping, hideous holes in it, and he falls back and thrashes on the ground, holds at his throat and chokes and spits and you’ve thrown in now.  You’ve made perfectly fucking clear.  This is throwing your life in on fate, you figure.  Uumbrage finds you bloody to the neck with brother’s blood or the burn and pound of Kurloz’s power and his rage come and take you away.  That’s one less they have to kill. 

You kick his body away and force yourself to twist and pull, riding fire in your insides now, burning in your pan and up your horns.  You pull at the chain on one wrist—again.  Again.  Again and your wrists have been rubbed raw long ago now—they bleed and burn and your pan flinches from a feeling that strong, twisting at your bile sac and whiting out your hearing except for the rush and pound of blood.  No time for that—pull again.  Again.   _Again—_

It’s not the chain that breaks—the cuff, the buckle where it locks, cheap and weak and made to hold you still and pretty for them more than to keep you bound.  It snaps away and the air hits your bloodied, torn wrists and for a second you can’t see or hear or feel anything but hurt like white noise.  You come back on your side, curled up around your frond, and the air smells of bile.  You didn’t have fuck-all to throw up but your throat burns from the acid you forced through it. 

“ _Why seek martyrdom,_ ” you rasp at yourself, and the words have more power even from your numb, burning mouth than they did locked away in your pan and it is  _so good_  to spit scripture again, even to nobody.  “ _—why when you could—_ hkkh—!”  More bile, more acid.  Moving again, moving how you want and not being pushed around, it feels  _so fucking good_  but your body howls against you every single twitch and tug.  You spit and it’s spit and bile and blood.  Yours and his both.  Your voice cracks and chokes.  Angels.  It was always going to be the book of Angels, time like this.  “— _when you could—bring a hundred down with you—_ turn martyrdom to motherfucking murderdom, ha— _ha—hkkk—_ “  His eyes are watching you so blank.  You spit at him that time.  You’re not—you’re not sorry you’re not sorry you’re not sorry but you never wanted to know what your own color’s lifeblood tasted like on your tongue.

“— _Shit, kin,_ ” you mumble at yourself, and pull at the other cuff with your claws.  “— _let’s be destroyers._ ”

You’ve got all but the last cuff off when you hear feet and you look up to see painted faces in the door.  You got no time or want to hide the body at your feet, the purple blood all down hands and neck and chest, and you push up to your feet instead and stand on your own for the first time in what feels like a whole lifetime.  It  _burns_.  You bare your teeth and hiss.

The motherfucker at the door comes running to you and you lash out and grab them too like you did the dead corpse-meat on the floor.  Only parts of you work at any time so you use it for your own strength, grab them hard and throw yourself off to one side so you land on top of them, going for their throat  _bleed out your tainted ugly blood you DAMNED HERETIC—_

You snap too early as they jerk back, and they lash out a leg and get you hard in the gut, throw you back right off them and into the air so you land hard on your back by your pile, the stink of your sweat and fear and hate and their evil drugs.  There’s feet running.  More on the way.  You reach for a club and find you have none, reach for your sylladex and find all your cards empty and nothing coming to hand, and you just crook your claws and bare your fangs and  _snarl._

_“WHAT IS GOING ON HERE.”_

Uumbrage’s voice all but staggers you back.  He’s  _shaking_  angry, his eyes hurt like white-hot knives  in your pan and your hate and want to kill him hits the terror in your gut and makes you pull again at the last cuff left on you, trying to get up on your feet, clawing at the one who you dragged down when he tries to grab at you. You get a lucky shot—he rolls away howling, holding at his eye where there’s blood splattered on his face.  You get to your knees and then look up and see those bright, hard eyes.

“You  _ignorant_ WRIGGLER!”

“Back the  _fuck_  off me!”

“You have  _no idea_  what we’re offering you!”

“—heretic shit-eating fuckery you ain’t gonna—”

“I am  _not losing another incarnation_ , you  _will not_  ruin—”

“He’s COMING!”

He stops dead.  Stares at you, and you shouldn’t be saying this some part of your pan screams at you to  _shut up shut up_  but they wanted you a fucking PROPHET and you will goddamn motherFUCKING  _PROPHESY_. 

“ _He’s coming,_ ” you spit, and your mouth is painted with blood.  Your eyes burn like they’re scarlet-red with purest holy rage and it’s  _fire._   It’s knowing you’ll die but hotter and brighter.  It’s the bloodiest joke you ever told.  Your hands that were painted in their colors, all red and green, are painted purple now with blood.  Your color, your  _color,_  not their fake bullshit colors that were never yours.  “ _He’s coming to do judgment on you.  You gave me eyes to see and I SAW._ You gave me tongue to speak and HOLY FUCKING  _SHIT_ DID I MOTHERFUCKING  _SPEAK!!  My motherfucking words will bring you_ low, motherfucker!”

“—brother Uumbrage?”  One of them dares a whisper and he jerks like a moment he wants to claw them open.  “—brother, wh-what is he—”

“… _his_ ancestor,” says Uumbrage, and you laugh and choke on blood and spit purple and burning acid on the ground.  Your legs are shaking.  Gold jingles soft and almost like music over the ugly wet sounds of Gamzee Makara, being alive.  Still alive.  “His ancestor has seized the connection.  Poisoned him, somehow.  We have to restrain him, and end this.  It’s time we dealt with this,  _once and for all._ ”

Fuck fuck  _fuck_  you don’t have the hands or the strength or the speed to take them all, even one of them after the other would be more than you want to handle.  You falter just a second, fear overtakes your fury, and in that second he’s in front of you, so fast you don’t hardly see him move.  His hands have your wrists and they’re tighter than the cuffs, harder than the chains.  He avoids your snaps and struggles like a lusus dealing with a fussy grub, and his weight bears you down with your legs useless kicking on either side of him and his hands pinning yours over your head.  

“ _He’s going to kill you_ ,” you wheeze out, no air left from the  _thud_  of your back hitting ground, and he growls and squeezes your wrists and you hear something  _snap._   Your broken keening scream doesn’t hardly come to your own ears—everything cuts out again, the howling of your blood in your ears drowns any sound of your body’s making.  When you come back he’s tugging a cuff tight and he doesn’t spare your broken wrist—the cult gasps and sobs and mutters somewhere far away as he jerks a new buckle tight on your screaming frond, every jerk another little white-hot stab.  It feels good, but the fear smothers it like sand on fire, chokes the good feelings right out.

“Do not be afraid, brothers and sisters!”  he says to his herd as he works a cuff around your other frond.  You bite at him again and get nothing but a mouthful of robe, cloth and no blood or flesh.  He growls and leans in to hiss in your face, only to you this time, so quiet they can’t hear.  “— _you will not succumb to this.  I will break every limb if I have to but you will be_ purified _if the messiahs themselves have to do it_!”

You bare all your teeth at him and snarl like fear’s not something you even know the name of, and he draws up in affront and snatches up a handful of your hair to shake you so hard your eyes go black and white and flashing. 

“A triple dose!”  He snaps out, “—now!  And alert the guards.  We have an invasion on our hands.  Whatever poison has been put in his pan, the prophet has managed to give us a warning and it will not go to waste.  The Great Blasphemer is on his way!”

“ _You’re paint-fodder,_ ” you spit, and he snaps back to look at you as you jerk and pull—they don’t even shift, the cuffs are stronger than last time.  Your wrist is on fire and every pull makes your pan threaten to black out full and entire and leave you helpless—god oh god  _triple dose_  you won’t be able to fight you won’t be able to see you won’t be able to fucking  _survive_ —

You snap at him again and this time you get his fingers as he tries to push you down—flesh tears and he lets out a noise of pain that sounds like a blessing on your ears.  “ _I’ll hurt you until the day you bleed and rot and scream to death,_ ” you hiss at him, and your eyes boil inside, red and red and burning red.  “You he won’t kill,  _you I want DYING IN MY CLAWS,_ I’ll do on you what he did to your filthy heretics last time and when I can’t keep you alive you’ll see the real messiahs scorn in hell instead you motherfucker, you  _dirty shitpanned ROTBLOOD, protect brother and sister and lift them up and do not tear them—UHF—!_ ”

His knee sinks in your stomach, knocks the wind out of you.  You try to keep yelling—bite at him and jerk to try throwing him off you, but he’s heavy and you can’t breathe and he talks over you as you wheeze for air.

“His blasphemies will not be cured until they’re stopped at the source,” Uumbrage spits, and he takes hold of the cloth your teeth tore and rips a handful away.  Pulls shit from his sylladex you don’t know, things that glitter and are sullen-dull and tubes and needles and straps and tiny blades.  “Don’t distress yourselves, brothers and sisters, however harsh I have to be now we will make it up to our prophet a hundred times once he’s himself.”

A tube shoves straight down your spasming throatstem.  You cough and choke and thrash but he grabs a horn and a handful of hair and the ugly, gagging cold pushes down into you.  It’s big to look at and bigger inside you—constant and  _wrong_  and sick and you writhe but can’t gag it out.  He presses it to your cheek, and adhesion strips stick it there, hold it in place.  Then he balls up the cloth torn off his sleeve and shoves it in your mouth, wide enough so your jaws creak. 

“ _And what does it matter if he comes?_   He won’t have told many people where he’s going, will he?”  His voice is a frenzy, his eyes are on you as your acid sac convulses and nose runs and your eyes water like tears.  “ _If we kill him and his whole raiding party, we’ll have bought time._ And you’ll have connected by then.  I am done playing nice on your  _delicate holy self,_ Immortal.  I am  _done_  sparing your body.  Your soul is all we need.  Your connection and your guidance will serve us and lead us if you have to do it from a mediculler platform the rest of your  _fucking_ life!”

\--

Your name is Kurloz Makara and you’re so close you can taste it.  The matesprit finds no name or number in her memory, but she knows its airspace and when you look in that quadrant at the side of the flagship you find a shuttle docked with just the things she told you.  And there are things wrong—little things.  Things that wouldn’t ever have got found if nobody looked.  You look into histories on the move, and you find that though it’s a small shuttle and shouldn’t be good for more than quick trips, there’s not just one but  _two_  helms installed.  It’s bigger than a normal shuttle.  It’s locked and hidden under layers of  _you will be reported for_  and  _the owner of this vessel will_  but when you dig down you find a slow trickle of goods into its hold.  You find visitors registered as your blood-caste who have gone in over the last weeks and not yet returned. 

You find that it’s registered under the jagged sign of the Uumbrage, and you can taste blood and flesh and splintered bones.

Karkat pulls his husktop too as it chimes—scans it over and growls through his teeth.

“It’s Uderak,” he says grimly, just for your clots.  “—All the fuckers he had his eyes on packed up and took express shuttles straight in this direction.  He got a couple of his buddies together and rounded up a handful but the rest are gonna be there before us and they’re not going down without a fight.”

“Your warnings all noted and shit,” you growl back, and holler out to the rest of the squad as you come up on another stair and start on down.  “—they know we’re coming, kin, fuck stealth and fuck sneaking!”  Back to Karkat.  “—tell him to follow us on up, bring interrogators.  I had the fleet follow me up into empire airspace, it’ll be less than an hour flying from the Dark Carnival, less if they put the rowdies in the cockpit—”

“Captain!”

Your rowdy gang comes to a halt—Vantas looks up and grins with teeth.

“Flaysquad,  _attention_!  Officer present, you miserable fuckers, get your asses in order!”

“Eyyy go fuck yourself,” says the troll who shouted first, and snaps off a salute that ends with a middle finger.  “You said you needed as many as we could get, well here we are.  Some  _warning_  would have been nice.”

“Awwww,” Karkat coos, “—I’ll hold your hand next time too.  Listen up, you bunch of pestilent musclebeast phalluses, mission briefing.  There’s a hostage on a private racing shuttle in sector 458, down by the bow.  The ship’s full of the worst kind of clown and probably a bunch of hired hot blood.”

“And you won’t be coming to pick him up,” you cut in, and grab Karkat by the shoulder to yank him back around so you’re face to face.  “What the fuck, Vantas.”

“I have the empress’s permission and her  _blessing_  to take my flaysquad on this mission,” Karkat growls, and jerks his shoulder out of your grip.  “Now that they know we’re coming, we need all the hands we can get, and I want some of these fuckers taken  _alive._   That’s…not exactly your specialty.”

Grumbles from your clowns, agreeing but resenting.  Your hands are itching.

“ _I am going to fucking kill you_ ,” you hiss at him, and it’s a sign how his thinkpan has gone focused and white-hot how he doesn’t even smile at you. 

“Later,” he says.  “Time to go.  I don’t know how they found out we’re coming, but we have to move fast.  Arm up!”

The run down you fall in, your faithful on one side behind you, jostling and whooping and rowdying up for the fight to come, the threshies on the other talking strategies and comparing plans and making bets on who can take in how many.  There are shuttles for taking, and you take as you need—one of them has a big, rich-looking indigo in it, but he doesn’t even start to give you shit so you don’t kill him.  Just throw him off to one side and slam through into his shuttle.

“Alright,” says Karkat, and he’s got a hand up to his ear and you know he’s talking to his squad.  “Less than five minutes.  Lupiez, you take your squad to cull the helm.  The rest of you are in charge of subduing as many highbloods as possible.  Got it?  As many injuries as you want as long as you take them alive and likely to stay that way.  Let the clowns take the grunts, they have enough energy to work off they can deal with them.”

You growl—Karkat grins at you, all teeth.  “—what,” he says.  “Are you telling me it’s not true, bulge-licker?”  Then his eyes go wide, his hand snaps up to the mic again.  His cheeks go all candy-pink.  “—shut up you festering pile of shame-globes, I’m not  _flirting_!”

“You’re flirting,” you agree, and pull your clubs.  “You ready for murder, Vantas?”

“I’m ready to get my moirail back,” he says, and pulls out a pair of sickles.  Candy-red handles, blades black as pitch.  Meenah’s sign is laid in the blade in gold where it’s widest, and you smirk at him and know by how he blushes even the more than he had that they’re a quadranting gift.

“ _Can’t it be both motherfucking things,_ ” you say, and he opens up his mouth to answer and the threshie piloting you yells  _“Incoming!_ ”

The impact shudders the whole machine. 

“It’s got guns?”  Karkat is up on his feet, ignoring the shake.  “I thought it was a racer!”

“It’s modified.”  The pilot don’t sound scared.  There’s an edge of toothy  _challenge-accepted-motherfucker_  that almost makes it like you got kin at the helm.  “ _There you are you repulsive little_  HA!  Got him!  Yeah, so, they  _had_  guns.  YEAH YOU CAN TAKE THAT AND FUCK YOURSELF WITH IT!  EAT IT, BITCHES!”

“Good to see a couple weeks of medicull leave left you just as much of a raging crack-panned shitshow as ever, Takkar,” says Vantas appreciatively, and looks back at you.  “Hey!  What’s your squad’s frequency?”

“The fuck you need to know that for?”  And then, when he looks at you longer and doesn’t answer, “—we don’t have one.”

“What the fuck.”

“We run  _silent._ ”

“Why the  _fuck_  would you do that?”  And then before you can tell him all the good reasons why exactly the fuck, he waves the question off.  “—never mind.  Here.”  Pulls his sylladex and tosses you something little and metal.  “Put that in.  Oh go on, don’t be a wriggler.  If they find him, and they tell me and you’re not in shouting distance, I’m not waiting for you.”

“ _I’m gonna kill you someday, Vantas,_ ” you hiss at him, and put the fucking thing in your ear.

“ _—boarding, but it’s not gonna be easy,_ ” somebody is saying as soon as it clicks on.  “ _They locked down, and we can’t blow into the bays without risking the whole ship going.  Since this is a_ hostage  _mission, I doubt that’s on your agenda._ ”

“Yeah, good guess,” Karkat says.  “Hack it then.  C-squad, it’s your time to shine.  Whoever gets it done fastest gets a day off training, got it?  GO!”  He throws you a look.  “…we don’t all look at tech and immediately refuse to think about it because it makes the universe too complicated,” he snipes, and you’re riding too high on boiling rage and joy and the taste of victory to even take it too much a insult. 

There’s a whoop over the line and a voice snaps through  _“Got it!  Hahaha_ fuck all of you _, I got there first!  This is why we’re ‘_ C’  _squad, dipshits!_ ”  and the lines light up with babbling in your ear, “ _Sure, get back to us when you can_ shoot _, numbnuts!_ ”   _“Go pail a behemoth, if you hadn’t firewalled me I would have won!_ ”  “ _I think!  You did good!  A good job!”_  “ _Maybe if you had a thinkpan instead of a mainframe you’d train more often and you could, y’know,_ hit a target _!”_  “ _Yeah and we’re all_ super impressed  _Chyrch, you_ huge loser.”  and it’s…almost family.

And then the pilot turns down sharp and hard and you hear the hollow roar of a ship coming in a tight space sudden and you know you’re docking.  There’s shots on the metal outside, fire that won’t ever get through the hull.  It’s almost like the noise of rain.  You hear the other shuttle’s engine roar as it swings in, and then cut quiet—for a second, there’s just silence as both of you wait, not breathing, making yourself ready.  Then the door opens, and you  _run._

A wave of scarred-up shitbloods meet you coming the other way and your kin swarm and holler and bloody up their hands, spike their hair and paint their horns with warm colors and Vantas’s squad makes chaos that’s almost formation between your family’s wild charging.  There’s dirtbloods everywhere, and you breathe deep and let the anger that’s seared and stirred under your skin spread into the slick of your fangs as you laugh and wade on the fuck in.  Where you go, your kin fall in with you and herd the damned to your clubs and turn blasphemous shitstains from your back and each other’s both. 

You turn and see Karkat lock sickle to a hook that could skewer through him like a scalebeast, but his other sickle is already coming round and it paints cerulean blood on his uniform as he drags his enemy’s head all but clean off.  His crazy pilot swings a blade that crackles blue and chops an olive in half at the grubscars.  A big yellow tries to smash through and a fucking  _mountain_  of an indigo picks him up and throws him halfway across the room.  They’re no subjugglators, but they’re holding their own.

“FIND ME THEIR BLASPHEMOUS TONGUE,” you roar out to your brothers and sisters, and they whoop and shout their hearing.  “BRING ME UUMBRAGE!   _BRING HIM TO ME BREATHING_!  SCATTER!”

“Get a fucking move on!”  Karkat snaps at his threshecutioners, “Let’s get this mess  _cleaned up!_ ”

Your trolls mix and spread and scatter out into the ship, pulling out gauntlets and blades and clubs and guns, yelling and snarling and trailing blood where they run, and you and Karkat don’t even look at each other before you take off running too, off to the mainest bay door where the lowbloods stream through still to make their attacks at you.

 “ _Rage will come,_ ” you’re half-singing at yourself as you move, your mouth going on without your pan’s help, and you don’t take prisoners this time.  You kill, easy as breathing, you come down on them like the fury of gods themselves.  “ _Pour down and boil away petty fucked-up flesh you twisted in your blasphemy—_ ”

The lowbloods come ready for fighting and primed for killing—when they see you coming they realize what it is they were hired for, who they came up against and some try for mercy—you mow them down.  You take hits—a tear in your arm, your chest, heavy bruises on your shoulder and the side of your head under one horn where you blocked a big club and hit a wall.  Karkat is in the carnage of your wake, and you don’t see so much as you feel him watching the places you’re too blind with bloodlust to care about.  You got no time for looking back to see what scum creep out of the holes you pass.  You’ll take this whole ship, you’ll paint it with blood, you’ll  _have him back safe._   Any other way can’t be.  Any other option not fucking  _entertained._  

“ _Repent,_ ” you growl through your teeth, and it’s fitting you should speak Angels at them, here and now.  You feel lit up white and burning.  You feel like vengeance.  “ _Fitting as your last deed, in this life you were given then_ wasted  _like the dumb motherfucker you are._ REPENT.”  You take a head from shoulders—olive splatters up across your thorax and shoulders.  “ _—with all your soul or all your soul’s the price,_ REPENT—”

“ _Where did they all_ come from?!”  Karkat growls and kicks a bleeding merc away from him, but there are three more to take her place.  “They must have had more guards on the shuttles nearby, no wonder they— _shit_!”

“ _We’re losing people_!” the piece in your ear crackles, “— _us and the purples both, we’re—_ “  (CRACK goes something big and heavy, and you feel the impacts through the walls of the ship a second later, shaking the metal.  “FUCK!   _We’re pinned down on the upper decks!_ ”

“— _on our way over—!”  “—at the helm too—”_

“Hold positions!”  Karkat’s voice is hoarse and rough and too loud—distracts.  You take a slice on the arm and Karkat backs up to you, bleeding hard out of the meat of one thigh—the metal guards on his uniform are mangled and the fabric under and around is bloody with freak-red. 

“ _Fuck this,_ ” he snarls, and you can almost hear the bad ideas taking root in his pan.  “ _Fuck these guys,_ fuck _their cult,_ FUCK THIS!”

 “Fresh arms comin’ through!”

Karkat was in the start of lunging forward, had a roar in his throat and his sickles raised—he jolts back again as the hall you’re surrounded in fills with the fresh noise of screams and glorious cacophony like the melody of messiahs.  And over it all that voice you know too well screams out “Hey fam!!  What is the motherfucking  _mess_  in here?!”

Church purple, stripes and shapes and spots and painted faces swarm over the dirtbloods around you like a tide, fresh bodies eager for bloodletting.  In the middle of it, flashes of black and purple and bright, seadweller-gold shine—Sungazer’s paint is glittered and gleaming, design picked out in gilt and shine, and she’s got gold killing-caps on her horns and in her hands her favorite flail all starbursts and planet shapes on its pretty, shiny handle.  She’s gory to the shoulders.  Uderak stands small and fierce-eyed by her, and you grin to realize that this is your motherfucking  _reinforcement_. 

 “Well  _LOOK WHAT WE HAVE HERE!_ ” she says high and sharp, and the lightshow of her pan hovers around her horns in a haze, snapping and popping like the old sea-fire on the homeworld oceans back when there were ships to sail that never saw a star up close.  It sends her face lit bright and her paint is made for nothing less—the shadows make her face a death’s head.  “I think you  _rushed into this,_  my lord!”  She breathes in deep, and you don’t cover your ears, but you part wish you could because you know what’s coming.  Her voice is a cracking roar of a shriek, ringing off the steel.  “ _SEEK AND REIN-FUCKING-_ FORCE,  _DARLINGS!  MAKE THEM SUFFER!_ ”

“Sir!”  Uderak comes forward at a run as the rest of the troupe splits off, cackling, in the direction of the booming and sound of screams.  “Sir, I—I’ve been stopping to question some of the lowbloods, I think I know where to go!  They’re smarter than they look, your lordship, the motherfuckers have been leading you all around and up and down where they got nothing to protect!”

“What could you possibly do to them to make them talk after we got done with them?”  Karkat sounds hopeful as much as he sounds nettled—you’re both of you already moving to follow.  The oldest of your squad follow, tight on your heels, and Karkat makes a shrieking whistle and brings some more of his threshies to heel, bloodied and panting but still fiery. 

“Same thing you can do for a prisoner too far gone to keep torturing,” says Uderak, and smiles a smile that’s pure church enough to make a little thrill of kindred spirit go up your spine.  A bloody cruelty of pure  _competence,_  this wriggler.  “…I offered to kill them.”  A dirtblood staggers out of another corridor, away from distant sounds of honk and whoop and snarl—Uderak turns and sees it and moves like a striking scalebeast all in the same move and the dirtblood goes down with one of those tiny, vicious knives in its throat.  “They say none of them are allowed down near the bottom of the ship, just our color, the ones with the painted faces.  I’d believe them sir, they wanted  _so motherfuckin’ bad_  to die by then.”

“ _Fuckin’ A,_ ” mumbles one of the threshies.  “ _Fuckin’ clowns._ ”

“Should be down here,” Uderak says, and there’s a burning eagerness, desperate in his voice.  “Should be…” Hallways, doors.  You’re on the lowest level, running back from helm to stern, and his breathing shakes. 

“Wait.”

It’s a threshie, one of Karkat’s—you almost don’t stop, but Karkat and his midbloods do and a couple of yours stop too, curious.  You growl as you slow your stride. 

“ _Picked something up_?”  Karkat’s talking quiet.  “Something big?”

“In minutes,” says the threshie, and when he glances around his eyes are all lit up white.  “Oh dear.  Hm.  Weapons out everyone, I would…proceed with caution.”

“If anybody ever put them away I want to know why,” Karkat says, and glares round—you see a couple weapons come quick back to frond.  “Ready?  Alright, move.”

You’re off fastest, but Karkat catches up with you.  He’s fast, with those little short legs he’s got.  Three or four strides to your every one.

“… _Wiying can tell when something big’s about to happen,_ ” he says, out of breath and under breath.  “… _I don’t know how it works, I don’t know if it’s his psi,_ whatever— _but it’s dependable.  Either we’re about to get attacked again or…_ ”

He looks up at you, and you see it in his eyes, all the built up hurt, all the fear he’s felt, everything he’s swallowed down and down and down to keep himself controlled while Gamzee’s not there to care for him through a breakdown.  You’re both burning up like fuses.

And then, for the first time since you started down to the bottom level, you hit a locked door.  Uderak comes up winded and running slow and pushes one of Karkat’s mechanical-brained circuit-bitches out of the way to tap in a code and then bends over and wheezes.  He has not gotten bigger by much, and he is not a practiced frond in long runs and heavy work.  You slap his back and face ahead again as the door opens and behind it…

It’s another door, a door much bigger, and there’s a heavy lock on it—a big, tall shape is turned, closing it and reaching for the lock, and you  _know_  and you speed up as he hears you coming, you close the space as he starts to turn back to you with a face so familiar but painted blasphemy-white and damnation-gray.  You hear Karkat’s full-throated snarl, pure killing hatred in the noise, the full rattle and keen behind it of an adult rattlebox with a threat to make, but you’re already standing over him.

“ _YOU._ ”

He opens his mouth and shuts it again, and you can see his hands rising to pull out a weapon—behind you, hands draw blades and prime guns and his hands drop again. 

“ _Nothing to say_?” and the poison on your breath is acid and fire and  _hate_.  “ _No heretic scriptures?_ You won’t declare yourself martyr to your heretic fake gods before you get what’s coming to you?   _‘Children I love,_  I’d fight for both of you though it tear me in half to do it, I’d build and break, I’d  _bleed’—_ ”

“ _You have no right_ —” he starts to say, and there’s a rising burn to the words, there’s a jerk and tug in your pan and he is  _fucking with you._   You know the feeling of having your pan messed around.  “How can you  _possibly_ —” And then you have him by the throat.

“ _My beloved’s  been whispering to me,”_   you hiss to him, and slam him up against the wall with a grip so tight he barely wheezes, kicking and twisting but pinned.  The source of nightmares, the cause of your loss and your fear, pinned up like a twitching animal.  “You never broke him for your use.  You never BENT him for your FALSE MESSIAHS!  And he brought me to you.  Are you ready for the road you made to walk on? _You ready for the Dark motherfucking_ Carnival _?!_ ”

“ _You came too late,_ ” he wheezes, and claws at your hand—you tighten your squeeze.  “ _—h-he’s beyond your touch,_ defiler. _He’s—with the—messiahs—_ ”

Your heart freezes in you.  You stare and breathe, and he shakes and rattles, struggling weaker and weaker—

“He’s talking shit,” Karkat says, and shoves you to one side hard enough you jolt and wake.  “They wouldn’t kill him, not now.  He’s their only shot.  Tie him up.”  He bares his teeth.  “…Gamzee will want to be there for what happens to him.”

You don’t give orders to gag him, but they do.  Karkat stops and looks at him like pure poison as you turn to go to the door, and you hear a thump and hear the wind go out of him before Karkat comes up by you, eyes all wet and glaring, fists tight by his sides.  You take a step back and tense yourself up and everybody gets the  _fuck_  out of your way as you pull up a foot and hit the door with all you’ve got.

Lock twists, metal bends.  The door cracks open and if your foot aches of it that is the least of consequence right now.  That is motherfucking  _nothing._   The looks and sounds the kin behind you and threshies with Karkat make and give are nothing.  All and only what matters is what’s behind that door.

The block inside is dim.  Down low on the side of the ship, so it looks out on the space and not out to the rest of the shuttles or out to the Condescension’s broad candy-red side.  Around the walls, bright paints and cloths, nothing to stand up to the church proper but bright and clear enough to be church fare. Around the walls, lanterns and lights, but not lit.  Around the walls, windows that soar up to the ceiling.  In the middle of the floor, a pile of bright cloths and soft things, like a bed and a pile and a makeshift throne.  In the middle of the pile, laid out and shivering, chained up and shaking, a body.

It’s Gamzee. You know it before you look at him twice, know it the second the door opens like you can feel him there.  They’ve stripped him to dress him up again like some idol god; he’s covered in gold and jewels and black stone and not much else, not more than scraps of cloth black and red and green, and it’s terror and sickness how close it comes to the dreams and nightmares that have eaten your days whole.  They’ve hung his horns in gold chain and replaced the little silver piercings you put in his gillslits with heavy gold hoops, wrapped gold and silver threads around waist and fronds and throat and horns, belts of jewels and your sign in mutant-bright colors of candy red and fang-aching lime. 

Under the finery, when you look, there’s more to see.  There are cuffs around his wrists and at his ankles—one of the chains is different, lighter and looser, stained with dark spatters around his raw wrist.  The other three are tight and the chains short and heavy.  The matched set of three that used to bind him lie thrown out around him, discarded—the cuffs are painted with his blood, broken open.  The heavy new cuffs are black and harsh and plain, but the old, broken set have red and green gems in them, like they’re just more unholy ornament. 

His face is drawn and his body shivers and shakes—he hasn’t opened his eyes to the sound of running and of voices.  His face is painted unfamiliar. 

Around his mouth, a streaking mess of thick black wet and a splatter of purple blood, smearing over his lips and teeth.  There’s a wad of black and purple cloth tied in his mouth to gag him.  A tube abandoned and taped to his cheek like a mockery of a mediculler’s work, oozing black and brown and purple sludge sluggish from its end.  The air smells like acid and blood and bile and sweat.  A body lies by him in a wide pool of purple blood, and you remember the stain of blood around his lips as your eyes fall on the corpse’s throat.  It’s been savaged, and you feel pity and love and pride and fury all together and boiling.

“Gamzee?!”  Karkat is running out ahead of you as you slow, taking it all in—he’s dropped his weapon to his side, careless, eyes only for your boy, and you feel the winding-tight whine of the air and grab him by the scruff to pull him back at just the last moment.

“The  _fuck_  kind of threshecutioner hauls ass into a room packed full of what his enemy calls precious without so much as a goddamn  _look_?”  you hiss at him, and he growls back, still struggling forward, trying to reach Gamzee where he lies shivering on the pile.  He’s moving, he’s alive.  He’s alive.  He’s  _alive._   It’s only the weight of experience that keeps you from rushing forward too, dropping by his side to finally feel his skin on yours again.  Instead you feel the rough of Karkat’s uniform in your claws, and you listen to your sweeps of age and hold him back.   “You dense little fucker, use your pan!  There’s ways to make tripwires as don’t need wire—”

“I’ve got—plenty of experience—seeing  _traps!_ ” he yells at you, and thrashes around trying to get you to let go of him.  “There’s nothing there, let go!”

“You.”  You snarl it at one of his threshies, and she snaps upright, looks to you for orders.  “Throw that out in front.”

She picks up the corpse and you hold Vantas still and make him watch as she heaves it up and throws—

The air sparks as the body goes through it—warps and blurs and twists and what happens to the body is not a pretty sight even for your tempered acid sac.  If that wasn’t a dead troll before the throw, it sure as fuck is now.  Ain’t a piece left stuck together bigger than your head.  Well, that’s a trap you ain’t seen before. 

Vantas gags.  You drop him as his struggling stops, and he don’t throw up but it’s obvious that shit’s a hard-won battle.  Brother Uderak stands by your side and breathes, slow, controlling himself.  The threshecutioners look straight ahead, some paler, some less.  More familiar with trolls chopped to bits, you figure.  Your kind go more for the break and bludgeon.  No point spilling blood when you can incapacitate and bring home to bleed for better purpose. 

You’re wandering again.  Gamzee is shivering still, eyes shut.  The black stuff splatters on the silks and cushions around him too, you notice now.  Down his neck.  Someone poured it in him unwanted and choking, through that fucking tube they’ve forced inside him—he retched, choked, you can see where it trickles from his mouth even around the gagging fabric, where it trickles thick and sluggish from his nose.  His hands have blood on them, and you know he fought to keep them off. 

You have to get to him.  You have to get him out.

“There has to be a way to get through it,” Karkat says.  “If they could get through it to get to him, there has to be a way to shut it down.”

“Cull the psionic,” says sister Rishet, and takes her sword out, long and straight and rainbow-handled.  “I’ll find it.  It’ll be nearby.”

“I’ll go,” says brother Uderak, too fast on the heels of the words, and she looks down at him with a little frown, considering.  His eyes go you to Karkat to her and almost to Gamzee—then stop.  Then turn away.  His fronds are trembling.  His teeth bare.  “I’ll go help her.  You.  If I might be allowed, your majesty.”

“Clear out,” you say, and he nods and bolts for it.  You look back at Karkat and find him looking out after, watching your little brother go with the strangest look on his face. 

You’ll ask later.  Not important now.

“…any escape vessels on this boat?”  you say, distant, more the instinct to guide you than real thought.  “Any of them get away?”

“This  _is_  an escape vessel, sir,” says one of the threshies, and Karkat must have them trained up pretty good because there’s no sign how they feel about you in their voice.  “Unless they threw themselves out of the airlock, we found no way they could escape.”

“Contact the squad,” Karkat snaps out, and you can see his eyes snap back to Gamzee as he shudders. You fix your eyes some other where.  If you don’t, the urge to run forward is almost too fucking strong.  “Find out what they’ve got, how many casualties we’ve got, just—debrief.  Fuck, what’s  _taking_  so—?!”

The air catches fire.  The barrier you couldn’t see before lights up bright and green and then burns in on itself and is gone.  One of the threshies pulls a corpse up from the hallway without needing an order and heaves it at the air—it hits the ground wet and heavy but still whole.

That’s all you need.  You and Karkat both are off forward and by Gamzee’s side before the corpse stops settling.  Karkat’s sickles hit the floor—you got enough pan-power left to shove your clubs back in your sylladex, but no more than that because he’s  _right there._   Right there in front of you, and breathing.  Right there, alive and not bleeding and if he’s still here then you can help him better again.

And then your reaching hand touches his face and Gamzee  _screams._

You’ve heard him scream a hundred times—a thousand times before, but never like that.  He twitches and twists and thrashes like he wants to get away.  His scream cracks with fear. 

“ _What the fuck?”_ Karkat’s voice is tight and harsh with panic—it’s not loud, but Gamzee still winces at it, his face closes up with pain. 

“Sir!”  One of the threshies is coming forward with a rifle under his arm—his other hand’s got a grip on the arm of a kid in paint you don’t know.  “They captured this one trying to get down here, says he wants to talk to you about—”

“You have to get it out of him!”  the little heretic cuts over him in his urgency, and you’re growling already at just the nearness of him as Gamzee jerks and shakes under you.  “They gave him so much, they gave him too much—please, listen—”

“ _You know what they did?”_   Karkat’s voice is pure danger, ice and steel.  “TALK!”

“They said they would help him make communion,” babbles the little blasphemer, and his eyes are huge and bright and wet.  “—but—but when he dreamed on his own he only ever cried and—and they were  _hurting_  him and they said he was blasphemous before and that was why but—but he said scripture in his sleep and he prayed and cried and—” his voice is breaking now, almost incomprehensible.  “—please before you kill me I know—know what they gave him, let me tell you, before I’m damned—”

“You know what this shit is?”  You  close the distance and pull him up by his shirt, shake him hard.  “WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

“I just—just—I-I was to take care of him, nothing else, I just took care of—”

“Makara!” 

You have just enough thinkpan left to know Karkat wouldn’t use your hatchname in front of these fuckers, and to be grateful for it while you hate him.  The rest of your thinkpan turns you to him and snarls.

“Put him down,” he says.  “We need to know what he knows,  _now_.”

“Oh, he’ll  _fucking TALK—!”_

“Yeah, he will!”  Vantas has his sickle in his hand.  Your teeth ache with grinding.  “He already agreed to, he is  _literally_   _begging_  you to let him talk, now  _put him down_  and we’ll hear what he has to say!”

“—h-he—!”  the little heretic stammers out a high squeak—chokes as your hold on him tightens.  “—he’s overdosing, he—you have to get it out of him—”

“Overdosing?”

“They gave him a triple dose!  Please—”

Gamzee gives another trembling out-cry when you take hold of him, but it’s quieter and weaker.  The gag in his mouth muffles him to whimpers and groans.  Karkat takes a breath and then reaches out and slides one hand against the root of a horn, the other one to the corner of Gamzee’s jaw to push hard until it opens.  You yank the cloth out, pull out the tube they must have used to shove it into him with—pulling it out sets him gagging and choking, weak.  He can’t hardly seem to find the strength to retch, but more foul stench and black drug comes up as Karkat pulls him on his side and mutters curses to himself.  Karkat doesn’t even try at pretending there’s not tears in his eyes.

“ _Got you now,_ ” he keeps saying, really quiet.  “ _You’re safe, it’s okay_ ,” like Gamzee can hear him as far gone as he is.  The black shit they’ve pumped into him clings heavy and thick to your fingers; your skin burns at its touch. 

“Uderak!”  The name snaps out sharp in the air—you hear fronds and then he’s there, eyes wide and back straight and eyes everywhere not Gamzee.  “You brought a tox team?” 

“The best, your holiness.”

  A good call from his part and a righteous motherfucker of a blessing.  You nod.  “Send out, find them, bring them down.”

“Wait.”  Karkat holds up a hand.  “The old one with the curved horns and the X-shapes over their eyes, right?”

“…yeah.”  You keep your voice even but he must see in your eyes you’re taken aback because he shrugs. 

“I met them while you were under,” he says.  “After the party.”  He holds up a hand to his ear, and his next words come to your ears a little echoed, over comm and through air both.  “ _All squads, take a look around, look for a big old purple with exes over their eyes.  Short hair, big curled horns.  If there’s clowns around, tell them the Grand Highblood is looking for the…”_   he pauses, frowns.

“Untoxxic.”

“ _—the Untoxxic._    _We’re down on the bottom level, follow the trail of blood toward the engine block and you’ll find us._ ”

A minute.  Three.  Five.  And then, finally, as you’re about to send out runners looking after all, voices come through.

“ _Sir!”_

Karkat sits up.  “Go ahead, we’ve got you.”

“ _Found a creepy fucker with a big bag who answers to the title you gave.  Sent them down, they’re on their way and they are_ fucking fast. _Incoming clown, is all I’m saying.  Brace yourself._ ”

Karkat snorts, for all it comes out a little broken, a little shaky as Gamzee rolls his head slowly side to side and bubbles through the black slime in his mouth.  “ _…I think I can handle it,_ ” he says.  “ _Good job wrigglers.  Vantas out._ ”

It is less than minutes before you hear the hum-thump of feet flash-stepping.  The crowds step off real quick as Untoxxic steps over the corpses and sweeps up in their bare feet.  They’re spotless as usual, except the colored soles of their feet where they’ve walked through blood of all colors.  Their bag is on their back.  Behind them a wriggler no older than Gamzee puffs and pants, winded out from the run down.  Untoxxic don’t notice or care.

“Sample the poison for me,” they order, and their trainee nods for all her wheezing and hurries over to where you are.  Gamzee shudders up on his side a little as she pulls a vial and scoops up black from the smears on his neck and by his mouth, steering clear off of the stuff he’s coughed up.  She touches his face to hold him still, and you know it’s needed but you still choke on growls as Gamzee jerks and shudders and hitches in breaths a little at a time.  Words come and go in his crying,  _no_  and  _please_  the most, and  _stop, stop stop stop, please stop_ , and you go from standing back holding yourself still to on your knees by him faster than you figured even you could move.   _Stop_ , his voice echoes round your thinkpan,  _please stop, please—_ you know the harsh croak of his voice.  You know he’s been screaming, screaming for hours.  For nights and nights.   Untoxxic pauses and their face shows a touch of concern, a bit of sympathy.  From them, that’s all as you’re fit to expect, especially when they’re already setting out bottles and needles and vials.  Their thoughtsponge is all poisons and drugs now. 

“Take this down,” they snap back at one of their trainees, and she pulls a stand and husktop out of her sylladex and starts typing.  “Stitox 47.  R-rivivir gent—gent—”

“Genterex?”

Untoxxic snaps their fingers without looking up, nodding.  “—good.”  They hold out a vial of the drug—the trainee takes it and sniffs.  Shudders.  “What’s the s--shhhh-sharp smell?”

“…Pressar?”

“Good.  What’s the pounder—c- _counter._ ”

The trainee bites her lip.  “A lifter.  Uh…what’s his—“

“We aren’t medicullers,” Untoxxic says firmly.

“Yes.  Fuck.  Sorry.  He looks bad, so…88?”

“He’ll get drink back at the fleet,” Untoxxic says, and their hands never stop moving.  “—60, I-I’d say.  Good though.”  They take another sniff.  Wrinkle up their long snuff-nodes.  “…blood.”

You look up at the heretic, held by a couple of Karkat’s threshecutioners.  He sinks down under the look.  “ _Lowblood psychics_ ,” he says, timid and small.  “ _And…a-and…_ ”

He lolls his head off on one side, looks over at a cloth by the block’s wall that’s in your own bright purple.  Karkat gets up without you moving or saying a word, runs off and shoves through it.

“—there’s a bunch of shit back here!”  he yells back a second later, softened by the cloth.  “Some of it’s in pharmassacre bottles, but I don’t—holy fuck.”

“What?”  You don’t want to stand up—don’t want to leave Gamzee lying there, even in fronds you trust.  He’s too precious a life now, too rare a soul, and you might as well be tied to him with chains for all you can bear to leave his side.  It’s no issue too big though, because a second later Karkat comes out from back behind the cloth with a glass bottle in his hands.  He holds up the bottle and for a second you don’t see.

Then he tilts it to the dim light and bright freak red gleams and that’s when you recognize.  That’s when you  _know._  

“That’s  _mine,_ ” you say.

There’s a silent stop.  A staring stillness.

“Where…” Karkat is still looking at the jar—they’ve drained it more than half.  There wasn’t much to begin.  (There wasn’t much in him, so small like he was.)  “…where did you get a  _jar of my blood,_  you creepy fucker—?”

“It ain’t yours.”

He stops.  They all do.  He stares.  They all do.

“ _Blood of a one who called himself a prophet,_ ” the little traitor gasps out all fast and quiet.  “—I don’t know where he got—”

“I do.”  You take the jar in your hands—half gone, but still that freshest, hottest red like it just bled out.  Thank messiahs again that troll blood ain’t like animal blood.  Doesn’t fade and discolor in the air.  Made by the messiahs themselves for purpose of painting.  “My block.  The  _fuck_  did he get fronds up even there?”    

“We can look into that later,” Karkat snaps, and it’s the gift of pitch, how he gives no shits about what you worry and fret yourself about.  He keeps his eyes burning sharp and cuts away off you what you don’t need.  “We have to get him back to the ship.  He needs help,  _now.”_

“What in motherfuck we do with all this heretic trash, my lord?” 

“Tear out their helm and cripple the ship,” you say.  “Seal it.  This was their heathen church, let this shit be their grave and jail.”

“The bodies—”

“Airlock.”  Your lip curls to think it.  “…they won’t be doing their damning fuckery over the souls of the kin they already had plenty chance to damn.  That’s all at least I can do for the good souls they used to have.”

They bow.  Head off to follow orders, as behind you a yellow from Karkat’s squad makes sparks in the air.  Gamzee groans as he’s lifted, but doesn’t wake, and you look around the room and its windows full of empty space and its dark and foul air and let yourself shudder.

“…let’s go home.”


	27. Spirits So Kind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra-long chapter! I was going to end one section earlier, but it felt incomplete so I threw together another 3000-word section and added that on. Might delay the next chapter getting posted by a little, since those are words that were going to contribute to the next chapter's count, but I feel better about this chapter moving the plot forward now. :)
> 
> Plus you get more PoF, sooner! So I think that's probably a bonus. UwU

The Cult of Flesh writhes in its ruin as you gather up your wounded and your victorious in the shuttle bay.  Karkat’s squad is bloody, beaten but you’re impressed despite yourself to see they’re mostly alive.  They’re carrying a couple corpses—one in full dark plating and black cloth and one cerulean.  The big blue who was slamming around throwing heretics is carrying the cerulean’s body and crying.   Karkat goes down and in among them and takes horns, punches arms, makes himself known and they come close by around him and ask how you fared down below.  They look to Gamzee and you see in their eyes some of them who doubt that this was worth the price of asking that it took.  But they keep their mouths shut and they don’t put that to words.

The cult, you put to rooms with locks that hold.  Throw bodies in their painted chapel where they would have held your beloved for their own and leave them rot there.  Karkat has his threshecutioners take the bodies of the cult, sees your faithful turn their faces away from the corpses and pulls them away from it like they’re family that should be cared at.  “ _Come on you crazy purple fucker, it’s not worth it._ ”  “ _We got the clean-up, go do your clown thing or whatever._ ”  A sentiment all kind from rough mouths and faces careful to show no caring.  Trolls not family aren’t meant for spirits so kind.  What the fuck has Vantas been doing with these fuckers, making them so soft in the pushers?

You refuse to be grateful at them for sparing your family pain.  You won’t be grateful to dirtbloods.  You will fucking _not._

And yet when you land back down, who do you figure is waiting for you but the lowest dirtblood of all, all curled horn and wild hair.  Halore stands at her shoulder, towering up over her, still on his mission to keep her whole for all he won’t lower his eyes to look at her for distaste.  The threshecutioners crowd up close behind Karkat as he leads his way off the shuttle; the kin gathered round mutter and growl at the sight of so much filthy blood in their sanctuary unchained and unhindered, and then settle a little as their brothers and sisters are helped from the shuttle too, leaning on dirtbloods, carried by warm-color sparks where their fronds won’t bear weight. 

“You found him?”  The little lowblood looks from you to Karkat.  “You look like you found him.”

You spare her a nod, and she looks genuine and warmed to hear it.  You resent your grateful pangs, the knowing that she was what tipped you toward Gamzee, what brought you to the cult in the end.  God but you do resent. 

“How is he?”

Karkat’s the one as answers, being as how you’re still sunk down in anger at her presumption of aid.  “—he’s…alive.  He’s still onboard.”  That on your orders, for once today.  It does your family some good to get the knowing around that Gamzee’s back and safe and living still, but to see him stripped and shaken and hurt and marked in heathen colors?  No, he wouldn’t want that.  You don’t want that, not for your church.  Your family. 

Maybe she guesses—maybe she reads more shrewd than you figured—because she lowers her voice and steps in closer.  Halore hangs back, away from you, his eyes fixed past you and away from your bloody hands and splattered face.  You know he’s trying not to listen.  For a second, you remember your long-ago confidence in him, how he took your every secret and kept it close.  Even after you pushed him away from you, he never let loose a single precious word. 

But not now.  Not now when everything is thrown into shards at your feet, you can’t be rekindling shit, not even just to talk.  You leave him as he is.

“ _How bad is it?_ ” the lowblood murmurs.

“…not good.”  Karkat’s mouth doesn’t hardly move, his face is still and set and cold.  “We’re still going to need you.”

She nods.  “Let me see him.”

You turn to Halore as Karkat starts to lead the way back into the ship, and Halore has to take a breath before he turns his face to you but his face is clear and smooth when he does, not a wrinkle in his paint.  “… _Kurloz,_ ” he says, and there’s a testing evenness to his voice, too quiet to hear from anywhere else.  Motherfucker is taking a step forward by his own self.  Now that you did not expect.  “We’re thankful to see you back on fleet.”

“Shore up and assure for me,” you tell him, and he nods like it’s an order.  “…let them know it’s gone as best we could pray for.  Clear them out for me, back to their nights.”

“And has it?”  he asks, and there’s edge to his voice, concern that never shows a flicker on his face.  “Has it gone the best we could hope for?”

You open your mouth to answer smooth and false, and see in his eyes that look you know from so long ago.  “… _You just look out for the family,_ ” you tell him quiet, and Karkat looks back at you from the door, Megido stops and looks back too and you have no time.  You have more yet to do.  “ _Old friend._ ”

You see the words hurt him, but you see also the pang of warm surprise in his look.  It’s more than he expected of you.  It’s a kindness unexpected, for all you know the reminder, _friend_ , hurts like white-hot wires.    He is grateful for that hurt.  For once, it’s a hurt you find no glory in.

He nods deep to you, half a bow like obeisant wriggler at your throne’s foot.  Then he turns away and you’re released.  You have to let out a sigh, long and slow, before you can move away from where you stand.  Messiahs but you do sometimes miss old times fierce and hard.  Everything seems so simple in the haze of a hundred sweeps.

When you get into the ship, climb up and fit yourself through too-small doors to where Gamzee is laid out, Karkat and the dirtblood are already there, steps ahead of you.  They’re already talking; he lays it out for her, all you know.  Untoxxic stands over Gamzee’s body as you come in, and doesn’t look up when their voices disturb the quiet.  They have vials and tubes in hand, pouring a drop of this, a trickle of that, letting it run slow into an access skewer stuck in the soft crook of Gamzee’s arm. 

He still looks so small sometimes.  It’s un-motherfucking-bearable.

“His body is thirsty,” Untoxxic says, not looking up.  Water drops down into another tube, another needle in his other arm.  “—but no touch of water will wake him, and to p—p—to _pour_ it down his chhhhoke would be.  As lake—likely—to drown him as not.”

“He won’t wake up?”

“Uh-huh.”  You still don’t like Megido over-much, but you gotta have some respect at the least for her grip of ghosts. “What you figure you can do for that?”

“Souls are like ghosts,” she says, and comes to stand next to Gamzee, looking him over.  Untoxxic looks up a second, enough to frown and glance to you—you roll your eyes at them and they look back down and pour another little trickle.  A hand resting soft on the bend of Gamzee’s not-broken wrist twitches—they frown deeper, feeling with head on one side for the pound of his pusher, and then put the bottle down and pick up another.  “Ghosts are my specialty!  Shhh.  Let me look.”

You open your mouth because hell, no matter how fucked up you are over Gamzee you ain’t getting told to “shh” by a muckblood—and then of all goddamn things, Karkat holds up a finger at you.  All like _give me a second before you lose control, you big wriggler._  

You open your mouth and then stop because you feel something like burning ice run through your horns, down your back.  Something cackles just beyond hearing.  The air fills up haunted and freezing.  You sit back and shut up.  Sometimes that’s what being smart is and fuck it you’re _smart._ If you weren’t, you wouldn’t still be alive.

You stay quiet, and wait.  Megido sits and turns her head side to side, but for all it looks almost like she’s looking around, her eyes are shut. 

Long minutes she sits, and when she finally speaks it breaks the cold in the air and sends a warm spark of shock through your chilled bones.  “…he’s not here,” Megido says.  Her eyes are still shut.  “…he’s wandered away again.”

“Can you bring him back?”  Karkat sounds less than sure.  Messiahs all only know what lowbloods can do.  Untoxxic hisses soft between their teeth, but makes no comment when you look to them.

“I can’t go and find him, he’s too far away.”  Megido turns her head slow, like she’s listening around.  “…but…I can try to call him.”

“What do we do?”

“Just stay quiet?”  She’s got a twist to her voice like she’s laughing—your mouth twitches at the corner to smile as Karkat blinks and then colors up at the cheeks and ears.  He backs up to stand by you; she settles down by Gamzee’s body, leans forward and puts a hand on his arm like she’s just there to comfort.  The air, to your skin, feels suddenly colder.  Mist comes and goes at the corners of your eyes.  “This might take a long time, okay?  So shush.”

“I need a motherfuckin’ drink,” you say, and stand.  “Get the fuck on with it with your nasty self.”

“Come right back then,” Megido says, already drifting and far off.  “ _…you’re linked._   You can help guide him. _”_

Sounds like bullshit, but whatever.  You step back down and out, into the docks again.

The threshies have set up their little camp at the ship’s base, like wrigglers huddled in a shadow at high noon.  They move to either side for you—their injured lie out there, field kit and rough bandages when they sit in the gut of the highest ship of the holy fleet.  You look at them all as you walk through, and make no offers and give no helping frond.  Your charity is worn and raw.  Your short patience for the warm colors is strained to breaking. 

It’s emptied out, but still a few kin linger—more to keep eyes on the warmbloods than for any real reason, you figure.  You call up to them, reassure by your being there, and they relax a little to see and hear you.  You tell them go, and they nod and bow and get their move on.  When you’ve got him settled, Gamzee can be carried out unseen, laid to rest private and secret. 

It’s a bit of a walk, but for the sheer cheek of the lowblood you won’t walk fast to get there.  Fucking refuse.  You wander down to where your kin with the elixir sit, taking it easy as the pound of your pusher eases from the action and your aches start to make themselves known.  Cisine greets you in the eating blocks, up to her elbows in scrubbing foam and morning meal’s nutrition plateaus, and shakes the wet off her hands long enough to throw you a rainbow pack in all the elixir colors they got.  She’s a loud, talky sort of sister, and you stop and get talking a little bit before you have to go back. 

The rumors are started already, hardly any time at all since you got back.  Rumor has it right you went after Gamzee, known to be missing.  Rumor has it right he’s hurting in a bad way yet unseen by any of you, even the oldest.  Rumor has no word on who held him, and you’re glad for that; that the Cult isn’t even whispered on.  That anonymity tears its fangs away.  You thank your kin down below—even worn out as you are, food is a miracle and the brothers and sisters who bring it up for you all are miracle-made—slip your elixir in your skulladex for later and head on back up.

Things are much like you left when you get back.  Karkat has settled himself up, small and bloody and tired, against a wall.  He’s winding up bandages around his cuts and doing a fucking awful work of it.  Megido sits by Gamzee and talks.  “…I need to find Gamzee,” she says, and her voice sounds somehow like it’s coming from somewhere far off and away, down a long dark.  “… _he’s halfway between you and us.  Tell him he needs to come back.  Tell him to come over here.  Over here.  Over here…_ ”

She keeps saying that, over and over, soft and slow.  Sometimes closer, nearer, sometimes far off down that tunnel again, faint and muffled-off.  You watch Gamzee’s face so fucking still, and hardly breathe. 

You stay standing tense and quiet for a long time, but she stays sitting and the tension eases.  Boredom creeps in where it lived, and you go to the wall and settle, watch her still.  After watching Karkat curse and growl and mess up another knot over a gash up his arm, you grab his arm away from him and unwrap it all, then settle in cleaning and bandaging for him.  It’s something to do.  Something to think about that ain’t Gamzee’s still face or the far-off murmurs that make the air go chill.    One time or two you press a little at a place you bandage, and let yourself thrill hot at the little growls you get back.  Time passes.

You’re half dozed away when noise hits you sudden and sharp and jerk you back to waking.  You don’t have to think to pull your club—sound of snarls and shouts brings your weapons to claw and teeth bare by the time you wake.  For a second your pusher flutters like it has sometimes since the poison took you, and you can’t breathe—then it’s easing and you’re growling again, ready.  You look first to Gamzee, find the space where he was, and you’re on your feet by the time that sets in your pan, you’re up and about to yell for him before you see the shift of light from the corner of your eye and Gamzee throws himself forward in lashing claws and snapping teeth, lunging up straight at your throat.

“ _Kill you I’ll kill you I’ll—”_

Megido’s lashes of red-white sparks push him back from you even as you’re making moves to defend, and he whips round and tears at them with pure brute force to claw at her, struggling to throw her control off him.  Untoxxic hunches back against the wall—their staff’s out and Gamzee’s bleeding from a split-open cheek but Untoxxic has blood all down their arm.  The needles that were in his arms are thrown away on the ground—purple blood trickles down his arms from where they were, slow and thick.  His broken wrist won’t work for him and he gasps and pants for air as he tries to make it, sways with the force of the pain.

“Gamzee,” Karkat says, and Gamzee spins around to him instead, eyes all wide and animal-empty with pain and fear, “Gamzee!  Look at me, _listen to me—_ ”

“I won’t speak your fucking _blasphemy_!” he snarls, and tries to go for you—his leg folds and he topples, crumples, barely catches himself on his hands and stares around at you all like he barely knows you.  His breathing comes on fast and deep and gasping.  “ _No,_ no,” he says, like it’s to himself, to somebody far away.  Like a prayer.  “… _come find me come find me come find—_ “

Light closes around him. He thrashes and howls and Karkat dives down toward him like he’s been waiting on the signal, wraps him up in his small strong arms and squeezes.  “ _Shooosh,_ ” he whispers, and Gamzee groans and snaps his fangs and then gasps in a breath sharp and hard as Karkat slips his hands slow through tangled-up hair and over the skin of his face.  He’s cold.  Face all sweaty.

“ _Kurloz—_ “

“Right here,” you say, soft as you know how, and Karkat looks up at you with tears red all down his face and then looks away.  A troll crying in front of his spade, no.  No, he wouldn’t want to be seen.  You look past him and put your hand over his, heavy and hard with callous, cover his slight hot fronds and cup the egg-shell curve of Gamzee’s thinkpan.  “Gamzee.  _Gamzee, get yourself on back here.  Come to us._ ”

Gamzee gentles a little.  His pulse beats hard in his throat when he leans back his head, his hands crook and then relax. 

“… _naptime,_ ” says Megido, and snaps her fingers.  Gamzee jerks and then goes still and limp, bears Karkat down with sudden dead weight.  He’s still again, but not like he was before; his thorax rises and falls, his eyes twitch under bruised-dark flaps.  Asleep. 

“Well then,” says Untoxxic, dry and quiet in the silence.  “…That w-went well.”

\--

You carry him down, in the end.  The others come around you, and Untoxxic rattles their staff against the ground like a desert slither-beast as you go, that warning clatter of bone any older kin knows to mean _clear out._   Once, younger voices come closer despite the warning—you throb the air with fear, pushing out and away from you, and they squeak and back away around the corner in a scramble of claws on metal.  Wrigglers.  Always need a strong hand on young horns, turning them where they ought instead of where they will.  That careless world they’re in seems as far off as the homeworld from where you are.  You feel so very motherfucking old some nights.

The block you take Gamzee to is the safest in your ship, the block where you lay when you were poisoned.  He shivers when you lay him down, whimpers uneasy in his sleep, turns away and curls up in on himself.  For a second he jerks, his head throws back on his neck and his breath gasps in—Megido reaches out and puts a hand on him, all frowns, and he settles back. 

“…it’s still in his system,” she says.  “It’s throwing him out of himself.  I’m going to have to stay here with him, I think!  That will be fun.  There are so many wonderful ghosts on this ship!”

Your claws flex to hurt her.  You turn away.

“…I’ll…stay in Gamzee’s block,” Karkat says.  His shoulders slump a little as he turns to the door, and you see the bandages on his arms and hear the low-burning tension still on the burn under the words.  He sounds like you feel.  Like the fight is still humming strong and electric under his skin, like the fire’s banked up but not out.

“Nah,” you say, and take the collar of his uniform to pull him back.  “You won’t.”  Megido looks between the two of you, raises up her brows and then shrugs and turns back to Gamzee.  Untoxxic stares and keeps staring.  You take your hands off him.  “…we’ll find you some other block,” you say, a second too late, and they narrow their eyes at you but you know your mask is fucking perfect.  “Ain’t right to be in a brother’s block while he can’t come back to it.”

That’s the truth.  Untoxxic narrows their eyes all the further but you’ve let go of Karkat’s collar and your reasons are good, and finally they look away, back to Gamzee.  Karkat gives you a look, a question and a challenge rolled up into one. 

“Well then,” he says, and leans down real quick to press the palest of tiny kisses to Gamzee’s cold forehead.  Straightens up to let you lean past him, and Gamzee lies still and breathes and doesn’t move to your touch as you kiss his lips real soft. “…show me where I’m going, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

\--

The door to your block is barely closing before he’s all over you, pulling himself up you as fast as you pull him against your thorax, all the energy and pounding pressure behind your eyes coming out in breathless growls, fragments of curses.  You slam him back up against a wall for a minute, same as you did the first time you kissed him like this, but it’s not enough, not for all you want right now, not for the relief of having Gamzee back, of _winning_ Gamzee back for the both of you, of fighting wild while he guarded your back with red-hot eyes.  Not enough for how good it feels to let loose and feel the sturdy strength in him endure and push back at you. 

“ _Beautiful_ ,” you growl in his mouth, and work his legs spread wide around your hips, grind up against him as he shudders.  He’s tired and you’re tired, but he still growls and pushes to fight you.  To push himself up against you and bite instead of just being held up in your arms.  “ _What a little fighter._ ”

“ _Fuck you with that noise,_ ” he snarls back, “ _I don’t need you to tell me I’m a badass._ ” 

“You can say that all you want but it gets you fucking _hot_ ,” you say back at him, and he snaps and then moans low and wanting when your hands find his ass and squeeze two nice handfuls.  “ _Because you know what my regard is, it’s_ motherfucking money _.  You’re hungry for my good word and you can’t fucking_ stand _that, can you—_ ”

“Go rip off your bulge and _fuck yourself with it_ you arrogant— _nnh—_!  Ah _ah_ —”

His gasps are so sweet to hear.  For a second your hands twitch, you want to dig in your claws—but worn out as you are, you are still in control of yourself.  You still don’t hurt without intention, and you have no intention of doing him any serious harm.  He wouldn’t enjoy, and Gamzee would be upset, and he’s so small even after his pupation.  You lift him up against you and kiss him and it’s hardly a bite at all. 

“… _we did good today, wriggler,_ ” you tell him.  “We brought him back.”

“ _God I hate you,_ ” he says, like it’s a wonder to him how he feels.  He knows where you take him—when you settle yourself back on your pailing platform he tenses up just a second and then you feel him let go, feel him give in and let the worry go up in flames. 

“You’re sweet,” you coo, mocking soft, and he snaps fangs again, hot little mess of fury and pain and rage and want.  What a little spitfire you got in your claws.  “What you gonna do about it?”

It gets hungrier after that, more desperate.  He clings on to you while you tear your shirt off your back, and as soon as it’s out of the way and you’re working on his armor his mouth is hungry on your skin.  You’re just getting his shirt off, peeling his underarmor down to his hips to get a hand down his ass to his nook, when he ducks down and tugs one of your nipples between his teeth hard enough to sting hot and red behind your eyes.  A noise made of air and fury hisses out between your open fangs, and you get a yelp back in kind as you snap a hand up to squeeze hard at one horn. 

“ _Fuck,”_ he groans.  “Fuck!  _Oh—_ ”

“Is that a motherfuckin’ request?”

You mean it teasing, mean a joke, but he snaps his eyes open, looks up at you and grins to bare all his teeth. 

“ _Yes,_ ” he snarls, and reaches down to shove his uniform away, shake himself out of it bare and hot and small against your thorax, sliding down to grind hard down on you.  “ _Fuck_ yes, fucking _try me._ ”

Hesitation seizes up your back, side by side with a hot, urgent lust that jerks your hips without your say, grinding back up against him.  He’s small still, and Meenah’s been having her way with him but…

He seems to know your pauses for what they are—he groans, frustrated anger.  “ _I can take it,_ ” he hisses, and rolls himself down on you, shoves at your clothes until cold air hits your bulge and you can feel his hot skin on yours.  “ _—you think I’m_ scared _of you?!_ Do it!”

“You stupid little—” you start to say, you start to deny, but then he reaches down and grabs hold of you and slick, tight, boiling heat wipes thought out of your pan for a second.  “ _Hhfh_ ,” you say instead, and he laughs at the victory and bites his lip, straining to settle himself, relaxing around you.  “ _Ahhhh you little heathen you’re so_ filthy- _hot inside—_ ”

“ _Stop talking,_ ” he says, and lets out a deep, deep breath.  Takes a bit more, eyes half-closed and far off like he’s thinking of something else.  The focus on his face is so precious and so fucking annoying, like he’s trying to figure you out like a puzzle. 

“ _Mmmm,_ ” you hum, and feel him shiver at the depth of your voice, at how low in your thorax your purring rises.  _Like a quake,_ Gamzee gasped one time, half out of his pan—he probably doesn’t even remember.  _Like a planet all splitting up in bits—_ “No, I don’t figure I will.  Fuck but you look good like this, all split up wide open for me—”

He takes a shallow little breath and moans it out again, his claws dig at your chest.    He’s not as tight as you expected, but tight he still fucking is, and _hot_ , and…messiahs, fuck, the way his eyes fix on you like burning coal is a whole other kind of lust from Gamzee’s soft, gasping want.  He’s made more than half of you and you’re breathing together without thinking about it, watching his thorax heave as he takes those big, heavy breaths.

And then you shift up against him, he pushes down on you, and you feel him go tight and tense all over.

“ _Ow,_ ” he hisses, like it’s being forced out of him, and you can feel it.  You can feel the pain in him go from good to bad.  “Fuck— _hhk—_ ”

For just a second, just one second, when he arches up his back, pants for air, squeezes his wet-bright eyes shut and tries to swallow a whimper—just for a second, you want to keep going. 

And then you breathe.  And then you stop.

When you pull back he makes a noise you know he doesn’t intend, half a growl but mostly a whimper, and you feel that aching, tender hate, protective and cruel. 

“… _I can take it,_ ” he says again, and you feel the pit of your guts lurch at the memory of another voice, sweeps on sweeps ago, _I can bear it, for you_. _I can take it._ “I didn’t—you’re not gonna beat me, g-get back in th—”

“No,” you say, and shift yourself back, force yourself out of the awful, wonderful burning tightness of him.  Every bit of your body protests, but when you ease out of him you see his shoulders collapse forward, curved in on him with the force of his body’s relief even as he growls his scraps of defiance, _I didn’t surrender, I can keep going_. “No.   Karkat.”

You don’t say his name, not usually—he stops at the sound.  Catches his breath and looks up at you, and that’s why you still want him, that look there.  His eyes still burn.  Shadowed and tired, wet and dark, but his eyes are still on fire.  When you trace a claw past one eye he winces a little, but he doesn’t look away from you.  Never breaks that look.

“You could take it,” you tell him.  “—you’d tear and you’d bleed and you’d claw ribbons off my arms, but you’d take it.  I know.”

He looks away, and you can’t see for sure if it’s shame or pride or rage that colors his look right that second.  Something strong and unknowable.

“But that’s not my pleasure,” you say, and shrug it off, like the moment ain’t your concern.  He looks up and frowns.

“…are you kidding me?” he says.  “You would fucking love that, don’t even lie to me.”

Takes you back a second, and the next second you have to laugh, because he glares up at you so small and hot and blazing.  “Sure,” you say.  “Sure I would.  But I’d be real fuckin’ guilty for it.  And when Gamzee wakes up, he’ll wanna have the both of us whole for him.  Not you wincing around like you got nails in your nook.”

You tickle your fingers real fast past the lips of his nook as you say it—he jumps and gives the most precious, hoarse little yelp, then settles down hard and fast to glower.  You keep your eyes on him, and sink those fingers a little bit deeper.  You can see him try to stay still, see him try to keep your eyes with his, but then your claws scrape just gentle enough to threaten past the nub at the base of his bulge and he shudders up, caught on that pinpoint of pleasure and pain where you love him so well.  His thorax trembles, his bit-up lips form an _ohh_ that never quite makes it out his mouth.

“ _I wanna tie you up,_ ” you purr to him, “… _and just keep you like this for me._ Figure you’d like that.  Figure you know what you’re made for.”

“ _Where do you get these—_ hff— _these lines from?_ ” God, you’d swear when his voice sounds like this he might as well be saying _fuck me I’m ready to scream for you_ as any other Alternian words you ever heard.  Want is a sudden hard knot in your gut, tightening up again after his pathetic tries to deny the hurt softened it a little.  He sounds ruined, but not ruined enough.  Never enough for you.  “Do you just—watch porn during _all of your free time or_ ahh—or, or wh-what—?”

“What,” you say, mocking-gentle, and crook your fingers down and back up, stroking him over and over, putting the jitters back in him a little at a time.  “You think you can’t handle it?”

“I think I’m smart enough to know when I’m being goaded into a trap,” he says, which is more than you figured he did actually know—not the best track record of running horns-first into danger, your little fiery spade here.  “And agreeing to get tied down by a 300-sweep-old sadist for literally _any reason_ is 100% a trap.  Especially if he—hh!  If he f-fingers you the whole fucking time—trying to distract you.  It might work on my moirail but it w-won’t work on me.  Fucker.”

“Be the best orgasm you ever had,” you say, casual, and watch him twitch— _affronted,_ if you like.  Oh he is the empress’s little pailtoy and no fucking mistake, and the knowing of that is as sure and sharp as it is hateful to you.  Nobody could do for him like the empress could, right?  Fuck, but now you wanna try.  Wanna get him shaking and begging, fighting you with every word but too desperate to _not_ hand you over the victory.  And if you had him long enough, you’d have him screaming and blacking himself out, you’d use him so good—

“Well, looks like you’re really into whatever you’re imagining,” says Karkat, all dry over that hoarse, chirping _fuck me_ voice.  “—so no.  No, that’s not gonna happen.”

You leer at him and push the flats of your fingers up into him, and he colors up again and swallows down a squeak. 

“Well if you wanna get off today, we’re gonna have to find a compromise, you and me.”  You think on it, then hold up a hand.  “…five minutes.”

“Yeah right.”  He rolls his eyes at you, “—I’m keyed up, okay, sure, but I’m not that much of a feckless wriggler anymore—”

“Maybe I’m just that motherfuckin’ good,” you say, and pull a skull out.  When you crush it in a single hand without looking, you see his throat work to swallow, hard and fast.  “You wanna find out?”

You see him try to fight with himself, sense against hate and curiosity and sheer cussed bass-ackwards contrariness, and you see him go down with hardly a struggle.  He bares his teeth, and he holds out his fronds.

The second you snap the cuffs on and grin at him, he knows the mistake he’s made.  You can feel it in the air, see the dismay in his eyes for all he tries to play it off.  You got no time for that kind of game, at least—you say aloud what he’s gotta be realizing.

“…I could do it in five,” you say, and pull him up close again.  “…what can I say though.  I got appetites, wriggler.  You’re gonna have to do a good bit more than five minutes to… _satisfy._ ”

“You fucking _liar!_ ”

“You gutsy little sucker,” you return, amused, and hitch him up as he pulls at the cuffs, growling.  When you put your fingers back in his nook and rub your thumb up and down the open slit of his sheath, he shakes and doubles around you and you fucking _love_ a good pair of cuffs, goddamn.  Past you couldn’t even ever have imagined the use he’d get when Meenah tossed them his way on that wriggling day so many sweeps ago with a wink and a shower of glitter.

The thought of that day, when she showed you how to _really_ use them, is still sweet and hot in the back of your pan.  You smile lazy and burning to see him pull at them, and reach down to pull his thighs spread a little wider.  A trickle of red is running slow down the soft inside of one leg.

“… _Learn a lesson off this, beloathed,_ ” you tell him, and at the same second he colors up all over at the ancient pet name you take the time to thread his bulge around all your fingers and give it a nice _squeeze._ “You learning yet?”

“ _Unnhh,_ ” he says.  Fuck but you love it when he can’t talk straight.  It’s so easy to get Gamzee wordless and whining for you, but harder to get Karkat making noise instead of salty words aimed your way.  It’s great, having him small enough to pick up like this.  He fights back other ways, maybe the smarter ways, but for brute strength he can’t make a fight of it yet.  Not for a while yet, you can move him round and as long as you keep a hold on all his limbs and the claws on their ends, you can…

…you could…

A thought occurs.  Karkat looks up at you, must smell the wash of pheromone as it comes, and he has time to go “…what the fuck is _that_ look f—” before you shove him backwards into your lap and take hold of his legs one in each hand.

Your hands go almost all around his thighs, and he yelps and then struggles and growls as you pull him up your thorax to your face, pin him there hanging with an arm around his waist and a hand around his thigh and put your mouth busy at work where your fingers just were.

Meenah has you down between her legs and doin’ this so often, has been for sweeps now, he don’t even come close to standing a chance.  And you didn’t quite hurt him in a way that sticks when you half-fucked him, but he’s still sensitive with the memory of it, shivering and shaking around when you soothe your lips past the places you stretched almost too far.  You know he feels the flats of your fangs and you hold him real still and let them press a little, let them sting and then pull them back to put your tongue to real work.

He goes through waves, as you play around with him—he’ll struggle, try to get to you, try to fight you or make you feel good back or both, but you can hold him and you do, because he did good today and you’re gonna make him feel you in the afternoon more than any dirtblood he fought today.  He’ll fight till he can’t, pulling himself up with the muscle in his core all alone, which is a pretty sight to see and no fucking mistake—and then just as he’s wavering you tip your head and draw long and slow over every most sensitive part of him and he’ll fall back limp, hanging from your grip on him, shaking. 

The way you’re holding him his head hits just on one hipbone, his legs hook over your shoulders and tremble.  When you do something he _really_ likes, they tense and jerk and kick, and you feel his whole body tighten up.  You can almost see his toes curl behind you—feel them sometimes, his feet dragging at your hair or thumping the back of the platform as you lean against it.  And best of all you get to hear him swear bloody murderous revenge on you, through lips bitten bloody and bruised by both your fangs, with a voice more clicks and chirrs and whines than Alternian words.  He’ll make you pay for this, he swears to you, he’ll fucking wreck you, he’ll _oh oh_ oh—! 

When you pull back and let him settle away from the edge that time, he fucking _screams_ , and it’s a whole other kick from a scream of pain, the rage and the frustration and the _need_ for you in the noise.  His bulge is searching desperate for a tight place to go, and you lift your arm around his waist just enough it’ll fit there and then clamp down your grip hard again to trap it.  You’re painted red enough, nose to neck, without his bulge getting frisky with your face.

He’s goin’ nowhere and you figure the both of you know that now, so it’s right then you take mercy (or drag his suffering on) and pull your face away for a breather.  Rest your chin on his crotch, grin at the wet, slick noise you get and the considerably louder yell of worn-out rage from down below, and look down at him all laid out and bare and shaking.

He’s in one of his worn out stages—used up trying and failing to get to your arms in any way that matters, too tired to pull himself up.  He still spasms, on and off as he sinks back down from that little peak you almost let him have just now.  He’s got such watering in his eyes, he looks like he’s weeping—the muscles in his thighs and his belly tremble from trying to lift himself up and from what you’ve been doing to him, and you wouldn’t want to be solely the winning one at all motherfucking times but _good goddamn_.  Sometimes you gotta just _win_.

“Well would you motherfucking observe this noise?” you drawl, all condescension and sweetness, and when you cock your head a little to one side you can let your lips brush the curve of his trapped bulge, the dirtiest joke of a kiss.  The noise he makes is enough to bring a saint to tears.  “I figure it’s time you surrendered, little sugar-spade.”

“ _Nnnngh,_ ” he says, and tries to knee you in the face.  Close as you are, all he does is push your head forwards and get the bones of your chin slammed down hard in his crotch.  He sucks in air and subsides again.  Breathes in and out fast and hard a couple times, and speaks like a prisoner deep in a holy haze of pain.  The same wrecked, wet voice, the same panting breath.  Funny, how torture noises and pailing noises make themselves sometimes so similar.  “… _wht’re y…lookin’ at…shitclown_?”

“ _Ruination_ ,” you say, and you’re so satisfied of yourself it comes out a purr without you meaning, deep and true and hungry.  He shudders all over—his head rises away from you as his back twists and tries at arching up—falls back, a heavy, hot _thud_ of his pan against your belly.  He’s got no energy left for fighting you but to glare.  “ _Let your spade burn hot, drive you up and make you great,_ ” you carry on, because that glare is fucking precious and because you know some buttons to push by now, and you know he recognizes the tone of declamation by the way his mouth drops open in affront and hatred.  “ _—in this motherfucking way your kin will increase you and I’m not just talking about your bulge, LOL._ ”

“I fucking _hate_ —SO MUCH—about your _STUPID—CHURCH,_ ” he spits out, and slams his head back.  It hits sharp on your hipbone this time, and that stings but not as much as his fury amuses.  “It’s written out—like that—isn’t it?! Fucking—ISN’T IT?!  God _dammit!_ ”

“LOL,” you say again, all serene, and lay the flat of your tongue to his bulge in a long, slow draw, feel the muscle of it shudder under your touch as he draws sharp breath. 

“ _Hate you,_ ” he says again, and lets his head drop back.  “…hate _you so_ much.”

“Well fuck, if you ain’t havin’ fun I don’t know what a brother could possibly do to help you out,” you say, mock-innocent with his slurry smearing your smile, and press your arm down a little harder, crush his bulge against his belly.  He’s so far gone the ache of that doesn’t even seem to calm it—he makes a noise you’d all but call a sob, and his thighs work and shake as he tries to brace his feet on the platform and grind into you. 

“You— _know_ —what I n—what I want!”  He won’t look at you—his eyes are all tight shut now, he knows what you’re angling for and even better he knows you can force the words out of him.  He knows this win is yours.  _What I need,_ he almost said.  Oh, but you love your own cruelty sometimes.  It’s fucking sweet to be you. 

“Yeah?”  You turn your head, and he makes a noise entirely new when you suck a stinging bruise into the inside of one thigh.  “Maybe I do.  What’ll you give me for it?”  You didn’t even get your know on, didn’t think too hard on how hard it was getting to you, playing with him like this—your own words make your hips jerk up, sharp and needing.  It _aches_ as soon as your attention is drawn, that slicing ache of _too much for too long_ and _not enough more please more_ at the same time.  But like fuck you’re letting him down to get you off.  You want to see him come down his whole self, all of him laid out in front of you painted red.  And that’s what you’re going to get, if you have to wrench his admission out of him.

“What’ll you give me?” you repeat to him, and he turns his face away, won’t look you in the eyes.  Desperation boils off him like steam.  Was there ever a thrill like this, holding this much vulnerable flesh for your own satisfaction, holding the thing that somebody wants _so badly_ and giving it at your own time and wanting?  Could make a troll feel the ringmaster of the Greatest Show, if he wasn’t careful.  In a dizzy, breathless-hot moment like this, power like that could make you feel fit to outstrip gods.

“… _I…_ ” he starts, and he stops and looks up at you with eyes so wide. 

“ _Who won_?” you help him, and see the fury flare up in his eyes as he weighs the choices you give him.  As he understands what you want from him, what he has he can give you. 

“…I…surrender,” he croaks out, and it cracks as you purr against him, it breaks, his voice goes sharp and needy and hoarse as you drag him higher again, gentle and cruel on flesh too sensitive to bear, “— _you win you_ win please please fuck _please_ fuck you you WIN—”

It’s the way his voice breaks that takes you.  The way he kicks his heels against your back that pulls you under, the feel of him convulsing under you and helpless that brings it down on you, and you come a second before he does and have just the time to see him realize what happened before you snarl sharp and wordless at the ecstasy, let the noise hum through your fangs and through his flesh and hear him wail like you’re the death of him. 

You can’t get a hand under him so you just drop yourself down and he makes a noise that’s all affront when he feels you grind up into his back but he’s got no pan matter left to worry about that when you get back down and get your mouth back on him through the shocks that follow.  He paints himself red, utterly filthies himself, and you drag it on and on until his snarling turns high and sweet and desperate and he twists to pull away, then just a second longer.  And then, finally, you let him go.

He slides down, sweat-sticky and still all trembling and comes to rest half in your lap, sideways and painted red and purple.  You are a filthy and depraved mess, the both of you, but he is _ruined,_ still wet at the eyes from his desperation, panting in air with his mouth wide and wet, mutant red to the shoulders even through the dark of his skin.  His jank mutant gills flare up, looking for water where he can’t get enough air.  His fins are purest red, fluttering fast and desperate in surrender to you.  You pat his belly a little bit, grin at him through your own daze of _hot_ and _good_ and _right_ that your pan is throwing your way, and he just gasps.  Spasms up once, another aftershock, and then falls back down against you.  His bulge is still slowly retreating back away—when you reach for it, teasing, he makes the weakest excuse for a growl and then whines and shudders and goes still again. 

“Told you…I’d make it a good one,” you say, and you know, you _know_ by the way his eyes narrow at you he notices how you gotta catch your wind in the middle of the words.  He’ll rag you about it later, _don’t pail yourself to death, you decrepit old corpse_ —for now he’s got nothing in him.  Running on empty. 

Literally.  Good thing your pailing platform don’t stain. 

He lies another couple seconds before he blinks and starts to move around—rolls, and it takes him a couple tries to get up on all fours, wobbly and shaking and still dripping all down his legs.  His ass is so fuckin’ sweet, all round and inviting, and you’d smack it real good if that didn’t mean you would have to move.  Which, just… _fwugh._   Moving.  Nope.  You’re good.

“ _Holy…fuck…”_ Karkat mumbles, and then he sits up and topples right back over.  You make half a move to catch him—mmm.  Just shifting around makes everything tremble a little bit.  That’s some _good_ shit.  You gotta make yourself wait like that more often.  Karkat lies on the platform a second, still, then he reaches up to his head and groans.

“… _pan rush,_ ” he says, and holds his horns like he’s scared they’ll come off at the roots.  “ _Nnnngh_ —the fuck—did you figure—it was a good idea—t’just _hold me upside-down_ for _three hours._ ”

“Don’t be a wriggler,” you tell him, and wow you are red and purple all over.  Gods and messiahs, what a fucking mess.  Practically makes fuschia.  “That wasn’t even a single hour.”

“Oh my god you leaky-panned excuse for a troll.”  He tries again, sitting up slower this time—sways, all dizzy and weak like a newborn hoofbeast. 

“C’mere.”

He gives you a look of full and entire mistrust, so shaky and mad you gotta laugh. 

“The cuffs, wriggler, they were a motherfucking wriggling-day present.”  And then, as he starts to look down at them with vengeance in his exhausted ganderbulbs, you add, “…from Meenah.”

He slumps.  “…fine,” he says, all bad grace and growls.  He’s got that fucked-out breathless exhaustion to his voice that sounds so sweet.  _You win you win please…_

You are too old for all this, but you still feel your nook twitch at the thought, still so clear in your pan. 

“You just keep these around?”  he asks as you pull the cuffs unlatched.  They take a bit of doing—they’re made strong, strong enough for him, strong enough even for you, and with enough extra they could stretch to fit Gamzee’s skinny arms or go wide and take yours. _Multi-porpoise,_ Meenah’d said, and then she’d…

Well, you’d gone and gave breaking these cuffs your best shot that night, anyway.  Fuck.

“…couple hundred sweeps now, I’d figure,” you say, just a touch late, and pull them off.  He’s left red tender places on his wrists from pulling so hard, but they’re made soft and sturdy and he’ll not have done anything to last more than the rest of tomorrow at most. 

“Who was even around for you to use them on?”

Maybe it’s dumb, but you’re too fucked out to worry about keepin’ secrets just now.  “—Meenah likes it if you bring your own toys to the party,” you say, and know he knows the truth of that and wonder if he’s got anything special hidden at the back of his sylladex.  “Giving a motherfucker cuffs made special to hold him down, would you fuckin’ credit it?” 

“From her?” he snorts.  “Yeah, I would.”

He makes a good point.  You laugh a little, shift a little, groan a little.  Fuck but you’re sticky.

“…Nasty,” you say, and push yourself up a little.  Swing your legs off the platform.  “Who knew that tight, tasty little body had so much wet hidden up away inside it?”

“You’re so fucking gross,” he says, “That’s so fucking gross.”  But he’s still blushing and now he seems to have noticed the red painting both of you—he looks away from you and down to himself, then away from himself just as fast.  “I hear your ablution block is big enough for two.”

“Oh yeah?”  So Gamzee’s got his talk on pretty good, huh?  Well, you knew he liked to brag.  “If you’re looking for the full motherfucking _experience_ I hope you’re good and ready, I don’t think your ass—”

“You know what I meant!”  The way he squeezes his legs together, you got to think he does know, at least a little.  You’ve seen how it takes him to get eaten out, but how would he squirm, how would he squeak and writhe and growl at you if you just turned him over your knee and—

“—Alternia calling Giant Skinny Scumsucker, come in Scumsucker!”  Karkat has his fronds on his sides, glaring at you all dark and hard like a schoolfeeder with a pupil not getting a good listen-at on.  “Holy shit, what is going on with you?  I thought Gamzee spaced out from the sopor, but I guess it came straight out of the slurry, huh?”

He makes a fair point.  Ain’t like you, fading in and out.  Can’t stop your pan wandering off to Meenah’s curves and soft lips over fangs, Gamzee’s shivering cries, the burning embers of Karkat’s eyes as you—

“I gotta clean up,” you say, and wrench yourself up onto your feet.  “—and then ‘coon.  Got work in the afternoon to get done.”

The water in your ablution block’s gotta be only just warm for Karkat, but he seems to appreciate anyway as the two of you drag your used-up corpses in there to get clean.  Makes a happy little chirr as he walks into it you know you ain’t supposed to hear.  You take yourself over to one of the seats around the edges; settle down in the wet and watch him as he walks, cautious-slow and sore, over to settle down just in arm’s reach.  Not looking at you. 

Everything that’s happened tonight and today comes down all in one hard, fast wave as you look at him, settled there, still with bandages on his arms, head bowed down.  There’s a solid steadiness to his bowed back you don’t feel in Gamzee’s—he’s grounded.  His spirit goes to no lofty heights, but his feet stay on the ground.

“ _Good work,_ ” you tell him, and reach out to scruff up his hair so it falls unruly in his face and drips down his nose. 

“You didn’t do half-bad yourself,” he says, and when he looks back at you there’s an even, tired regard in his eyes.  His looks hold a true touch of respect, and if you had been told two-hundred sweeps ago you would covet that look so jealously from a feisty little barely-grown mutant with a mouth too loud and eyes too bold, you would have culled them on the spot. 

You let the water soak through your hair and twist it up instead, force the unruly spikes of it into some form of control and turn your face up to soak water over your stained lips and chin.  Your paint is worn away there—Karkat shifts around as he looks at you, parts his legs with a wince and frowns down.

“I’ve got fucking— _greasepaint_ ,” he says, with such aggrieved anger you can hardly credit it, “—in my _nook_.”

You bust up laughing.  He grumbles at you about how it ain’t funny, which it is, and how he’s gonna get an infection, which he probably won’t, for all it’s a thought you find equal parts tragic and hilarious.  Thought of him going to some doctorturer and telling them, _a clown ate me out and, well…_ fuck, you just inhaled water.

You cough and sputter and he takes his turn to laugh at you, and then the both of you just laugh for a little bit, still hazy and dumb and just the slightest touch shaky at the fronds.  He scrubs awkward at his nook with his fingers, all winces, until you give in and pull rags out of your sylladex to throw at him.  You scrub up your face, fast and not looking at him, and he does you the least courtesy of not staring, for all he makes no effort to avert or avoid of the sight.  Well fuck him.  Your face is fucking gorgeous.  He can just stare till his bulbs fall out if he wants to, see if you care.

You should paint back up, coat your face and let it dry before you go to the ‘coon too, but by the time you stagger on out of the water together it’s like the both of you have had the strong washed right off of you.  Both of you wandering slow and wobbly and tired out of the wet and warm and into the cool and dry of your block.  You can’t be fucked to deal with that right now.  Can’t even start to care. 

“Is there gonna be room in there for both of us?”  Karkat gets up to look through the hole in your ‘coon—he whistles, shakes his head.  “—wow, okay, I guess there is.  You fucking highbloods.”

“I should make you sleep in your mess in the other block,” you say, but there ain’t much of a fire in the words, and he just snorts at you.  “if I didn’t want you rested up for the night I’d fuckin’ do it, too.”

“…the night,” he says, and the grin falls from the corners of his mouth.  “…yeah.”

There’s a silence for a moment as the both of you contemplate.  Think on how much there is for doing and how far you’ve come and how much farther you might have yet to go.

“We’ll see how it goes,” you say finally, and he sighs his grievance and nods.  “We’ll see.”

“We’ll just fucking see,” he repeats, and climbs up still bare-ass naked to sprawl across the empty space of your luxury ‘coon.  You’re big, so you had them get you one bigger—if it’ big enough to hold two of you, it’s big enough to hold whoever else might sleep here, and you’ll never hit the walls.  He looks smaller, in all that space, lit up ghostly and green by the slime.  Karkat looks up and off to the distance, and says the words like a promise, like an oath to some god you don’t know.

“…tomorrow,” he says again, and closes his eyes.  “…we’ll see.”

\--

You always sleep late the night after a battle.  It’s like all that holy rage burns something up in you, something that takes time and dead sleep to fill back again. 

When you do wake up, Karkat is at your document plateau with his husktop open.  You shift, and find yourself tolerably stiff, enjoyably sore.  Must be that your gutsy little mutant is heavier than you figured—your pectorals ache like holding him up was a strain, the beat-up chitin plates riding your hipbones throb a little where his head pounded up against them.  Still.  It’s a good ache, all settled down in your bones, and you stretch out like a meowbeast in the ‘coon, curl your toes and roll your neck until something pops. 

Karkat looks up and gives you a glower when you pull yourself out of the recuperacoon, but you are, for a single time in your life, in a less than growling mood this afternoon and you just wiggle your brows at him and carry on to get the slime scrubbed off.  When you come out, face all painted and clean clothes on, he’s still typing, but he’s got a cup of something hot from somewhere and his scowl is less dark.  You lean in over him to see—takes you a second, and then you realize what you’re looking at and make a noise that’s half a laugh, half a sigh.  Mission report and debriefing.   Well, better him than you, although fuck knows why he picked now to get this done.  Paperwork’s bad enough at reasonable hours of the night, let alone right after waking up. 

It doesn’t matter.  He’ll do what he does, none of your affair.  You go instead to the corner half-hidden off behind your ‘coon, kneel down slow and pull your pack of elixir from out your sylladex.  You deliberate a second, counting up days—there’s no saint’s day today.  Since you got the pick and you’d like to figure your holy jokers won’t mind a touch of a laugh, you find the brightest red you can and pour some out.  Throw up stardust and bow your head as it fizzes bright in the air around you and in the sweet red, sending up that burned-sugar smell you’ve long learned is the smell of prayer. 

Your devotions that day are thanks all around—for the lives that came out from that mission where your messiahs had no need to spare a single one of you, for the strength given you to crush and destroy blasphemy as it came to you, for your precious boy back and resting, given over to ones who’ll help him back to himself. 

It’s a trance, a daze—you go deep into yourself, sit and breathe and let things happen in your pan.  Sermons got their place, scripture and family got their place, and this quiet time alone with your gods, this has its place too.  Gamzee told you, before you left, before this whole fucking mess got started, you needed to take the time more.  He was right. 

The image of him returns to you, small and alone, watching your ship pull out away into space—the sound of his voice, _I just feel like somethin’ bad’s gonna happen if you go._   And away you went anyhow, and left him behind.

You feel the sting of pain, but it takes a couple long seconds for you to come back to yourself enough to know it for what it is.  When you shift yourself and unclench your fronds, you got clawmarks dug into your palms.  Elixir’s gone, nothing but a couple grains of stardust at the bottom of the bowl, and the air smells like sugar and warmth.

You bow down low in final respect, straighten yourself up and get back up on your feet with more effort than you care to admit.  It must have been a long time you were down there, because your legs are almost cramped from kneeling.  Stardust glitters on your fingers and in the folds of your shirt as you shift—you’ll be seeing the glitters in your paint until you wipe it all off and change it entire, and that’s maybe not a bad thing, if it reminds you to take quiet time to pray once and a while before you get busy. 

You turn around, and Karkat’s watching you.

“…did you just fall asleep sitting up?”  His voice sounds strange and loud after the echoing quiet of your own thinkpan.  Too loud, too brash, too irreverent. 

“No,” you say, and leave it there.  He looks yet still confused, like you don’t answer to his satisfaction.

“You were there for almost an hour.”

You’re surprised it was so long and surprised it wasn’t more, both at the same time.  You shrug.  “…devotions take how long they take.”

And to your honest motherfucking surprise, he comes out with no more questions, no attack or provocation.  He sighs at you, yeah, he tightens his lips up and shakes his head once, but he makes no sass at you and comments not a single word on your gods and your holy ways.  He finds his armor, pulls on the gold-bronze plates over his underarmor and rolls his shoulders until they settle in.   He combs his hair with his fingers and straightens himself up, and you pull on chitin armor and arm guards, let your hair loose and stretch up to your full height too. 

When you get out the door to the feeders’ and leaders’ blocks, you see before anything else a short little shape and a pair of split-spiral horns.

Uderak’s standing there like he’s waiting for you, like he’s been waiting for a while.  When he sees you come out and Karkat both, his eyebrows rise up high behind his hair.  When he steps forward to you though, he’s nothing but polite.  “You’re going to go see him,” he says. 

“Could be,” says Karkat, with a tone to him you don’t figure you’ve heard before.  You look at him, but he’s looking only at your brother in his neat inquisitor’s gear. 

Uderak thinks on that.  Looks at the two of you, one after the other.  Then, “…may I come with you,” he says, fast and formal, and ducks a bow.  “—please.”

You think on it a minute.  But he’s loyal and you know he’s been a good help to your matesprit when he’s needed.  “…yeah,” you say. 

Uderak nods to you, but he don’t straighten up.  You frown and pause and—

“…fine,” says Karkat.  There’s a long second where they meet eyes, and something goes on between them—Uderak ducks his head down again and his ears go colored.  “—fine.  Let’s go.”

You give a look from Karkat to your little brother as you start to walk silent—he’s stealing his own looks, although he stops and ducks his head down when he sees you looking.  There is something here, something you had no knowing of, but you’ll be fucked if you’re gonna stop and try to figure it out right now.  Now, you have more important things to do. 

You make quite a set, you and the threshecutioner and your tiny brother in his inquisitioner gear all walking quiet down the levels to the safe rooms.  You take the safest way you know when kin stop and ask questions at you—laugh it off.  Shake your head and grin and give half-answers, leave them behind you feeling in the know but with no real knowing in their thinkpans.  It’s a balance, but it’s a skill you’ve picked up.  Tell people enough.  Just enough, as much as they need to know.

Uderak watches you, and you get the feeling he sees you do it and knows it for what it is.  Karkat just stands and looks ahead when you’re stopped for questions.  Feet apart, hands together in front of him and eyes straight like he’s in training again waiting for a highblood to come through and give orders.  Some wrigglers see the three of you coming and whisper and edge closer—you turn and raise an eyebrow at them and they all squeak and turn heel and run.  One or two stay long enough to throw you a bow—you nod back to those, and they gawk and then sprint after their brothers and sisters, already chattering.  For no reason you get your know on of, whenever you turn back from the littler ones to keep walking, Karkat is sending wicked looks over at Uderak, who’s got a hand over his mouth like he’s trying to keep a smile reined in. 

What the _fuck_ ever.  Wrigglers.  Always with the drama.

The places around the safe-room ain’t hardly ever walked in, and by the time you get down there you haven’t seen another soul for minutes.  The door unlocks for you—for all he’s family, for all you trust him, you still put your body between the code and Uderak’s sharp slitherbeast eyes.  Some things you’d keep secret, even from your brothers and sisters. 

In the first room, you find your conscripted medicullers sitting up, playing some kind of game you don’t ever get your recall on of seeing.  From the way Untoxxic frowns at the board, they’re only new familiar themselves.  From the messy scrawl of paper by the messy scrawl of a board, that’s because the dirtblood made it up.   The both of them look up when you come in, and you’re cheered at least to see a flash of a smile on the lowblood’s face and no sign of sleepless stress on Krelle’s. 

It’s Karkat who asks first.

“…how is he?”

“Still resting,” says Untoxxic, soft but not grim.  “Sssaa….ssst-still he flinches from a tr—tuh—touch.  Still…distaste.  Dis _tressed._ ”

“…but still here!”  Megido chimes in, and puts down a bent-up card.  “I’ve been shooing him back into his body when he tries to go wandering.  He probably won’t thank me for it, but I think he’d rather be alive and hurting than dead, for whatever reason.”  Her arms are bandaged up, clawed deep and mortal from last time he woke.  She meets your eyes fearless, and you know she knows what a debt you owe of this, like it or not. 

“He’s still unconscious?”  Karkat ain’t got the patient waiting all up in him for you and your old wonders and worries.  Walks past you and Megido and looks through the gaze-pane in the door.  “He’s just lying there.”

“He sleeps a lot, even when he’s in his body,” Megido says, and goes over at Karkat’s side to look too.  “I can wake him up, but it’s not pretty.  He’s very upset.  I guess having you here might help?  He’s woken up seven or eight times, but he only understood what I was saying to him once, and the rest of the time he just yelled at us and tried to fight.  I think it hasn’t sunk in yet that he’s back where he goes.” 

And no wonder, if he thinks he’s been wandering, if he thinks what he sees is illusion and dreaming.  Being rescued is too good to be true and if he ain’t rescued and yet he sees you the only truth must be that he’s still chained up in their block of worship.  That he’s still their puppet-godling, their messiah’s-mouth.  Small wonder he motherfucking fights.

“Come on,” says Megido, and stands up.  Krelle stands too, obviously glad to forget the game.  “Let’s go see him.”

Gamzee lies as he did when last you saw him; still and quiet, breathing deeper and more natural but still so small.  Worn through and exhausted.  “Gamzee,” says Megido, and goes to his side.  Shakes his shoulder.  There are more bandages on her arms than there were, but she doesn’t seem to fear as she reaches for him.  “Wake up.  Karkat is here to see you.”

You almost growl at that, because you’re fuckin’ _here_ too, but then it occurs that he’s not thought of you as _Grand Highblood_ in so very long, and you’ll be damned if this cocky dirtblood knows your hatchname.  Fuck no.  Enough folks now as know it already.  Still.  The exclusion motherfuckin’ rankles.

“He needs a spark again,” Megido says, and before you can demand at her to tell just what exactly the fuck that’s supposed to mean, she holds up her hand and snaps her fingers.

Gamzee breathes in sharp and sits up so fast he all but falls off the platform.  Starts to scramble up and loses balance, falls back on his back with a panicked noise that’s too young for his dark skin and long horns, wriggler-panicked.  Karkat moves before you, pushing forward, putting his hands forward and taking one shoulder and Gamzee jerks and gasps and shakes himself still. His eyes are wide and wild and he breathes hard and deep and fast, big wheezing things that don’t get him enough air and he dies off into the most pitiful fuckin’ whimpers.

“… _Gamzee—”_ Karkat starts at saying, and Gamzee jerks and stares at nothing, stares right past and through him. 

“ _Don’t,_ ” he gasps, small and hoarse, and there’s no  tears running down his face but it all but snaps your pusher right into bits to see him shake and try to get away from you who love him.  “ _Can’t I can’t didn’t see—anything please don’t I can’t please I can’t—_ ”

“Gamzee!”  You keep your voice low, but he still shudders back from it.  His eyes crack open and he makes this long and awful noise and closes them tight again like even the dim air around him was a torment to him.  His breathing is faster.

“Gamzee,” says Karkat, and he reaches out and doesn’t quite touch.  “Gamzee, shoosh.  We got you.”

“ _—something,_ ” he croaks, _“…drink…_ ”

“We know.”  You look up—Untoxxic is already moving, stepping in and taking his frond to feel his pusher beat, hands barely touching.  “They won’t be forcing that shit on you any more, little one, they won’t ever touch you unwanted again.”

“ _Everything was—_ ” he arches and groans and it breaks into a wretched sob, pain and fear, but still no tears.  “—god, _gods and messiahs, fuck—hurt so bad—I_ saw _…_ ”

“Saw?”  You feel a nudge at your side—little Uderak with a big flask of water.  He holds it forward, wordless, keeps his eyes down on his hands.  He’s chewing up his lip something bad.  You wonder.  Karkat looks up at him and for a second something’s in his face you don’t know.  Then he looks back down and nods.  Uderak leans forward and tips the flask up and Gamzee makes a noise, startled, and then drinks and drinks and drinks.  “What did you see?  Gamzee?”

He breathes deep after he‘s done drinking.  Rolls his head side to side like he don’t notice he’s doing it.  Just the knowing that he speaks to you, you and Karkat and no imagined ghosts, is enough to put new hope in your pusher.  For all you’re torn up at the sight of him so taken and shaken with fear.

“Too much _,_ ” he says, broken and small.  “ _Everything_.”

“Okay,” you say, real quiet.  Real soft.  “Okay now, little brother, whatever the _fuck_ they made you take, it’s getting its ease on now.”

“ _Too much,_ ” he murmurs again.  “ _Too much.  Too…_ nhh—”

His eyes wander shut.  Brother Uderak makes the tiniest hissing sound between his teeth, and he starts to reach out and then looks at Karkat.  Karkat’s face is tight and hurting with the pity he feels, and he sighs and nods and only then Uderak reaches and touches his brother’s shoulder.  Gamzee twitches—opens up his eyes.

“… _brother,_ ” he says, and blinks.  His eyes are teary.  “…saw you.  Looking for me.”

“Hhkk—” says brother Uderak, and chokes on it, whatever that breath was set to be in his pan.  “—you—didn’t come to sermon.  I—”

And then you smell what’s in the air, and you know what’s going on, why he keeps looking to Vantas, why he’s so fucking _careful_ about this.  The air’s sweet and thick with the smell of pale want.  With _you’ll be fine you’re cared for you’re fine_.  And it’s not all coming from Karkat.  Your littler brother knots his hands at his sides and doesn’t pet Gamzee’s shoulder, doesn’t chirr for him all low and sweet and soothing.  Oh, but he wants to, though.  He wants to soothe.  He wants to hold and pet and be sweet to him.  And by the way they look at each other, by the way he asks so stiff and polite, Karkat knows and your little brother knows that he knows. 

You’re about to figure what to do about this, since you figure there’s something you _should_ , but before you can try to untangle that knot Gamzee winces up and goes tight all over.  Shakes for a second, gasps for air, and then goes limp.  His eyes rolled up in his head, his body trembling on and off.  A sound comes out his thorax, long and low and grinding, just a noise like misery.  This is what they saw, every time he went wandering?  This is the noise they heard from him, this shaking misery that makes him so small and broken, and they thought in _any fucking way_ they did right by him?It’s almost a relief when he goes limp and still, relaxes back and breathes out—

“Gamzee!”   It’s the dirtblood.  She comes in and goes shoving straight through the middle of you three, pushes Karkat into you and Uderak to one side in white-red sparks.  You snarl, but you don’t think she bothers hearing.  She looks hard at the air, at nothing, like there’s something in the nothing that only she sees.

“Gamzee,” she says.  “No.  Get back here.”

Air does something ungodly.  Your thinkpan aches.  “He doesn’t want to,” you say, and it comes out sharp and growling, protective of him for all he never said a word you could hear.  “He’s fucking _hurting_ here, he doesn’t want—”

“I know he doesn’t, but he needs to anyway!”  She reaches out and puts her rough lowblood fingers on his nugbone, right between his brows.  “ _Gamzee,_ ” she says, and it’s that strange sound again, like her voice is going straight from her mouth to somewhere far off.  “ _Come back.  You can’t wander anymore._ ”

Gamzee’s hands go tight at his sides, jagged arches that end in claws.  His back snaps bent, his thoracic cage swells with a breath so deep you think for a single mad second that he’ll snap his bones of breathing so.

Then he collapses down and coughs it all out again in a long, jagged breath, shaking and groaning and present again.   

“ _—want to,_ ” he says, finishes the words you heard in your pan with his own mouth.  “ _I don’t want don’t make me—_ “

“You have to stay here,” Megido says, and pats his hair twice, all business.  “…the pain will get better.  I promise.”

“ _Don’t make me,_ ” he says again, and Karkat’s face does something ungodly and soft and broken.  “ _—‘ll do better I’ll do good fuck I swear I will don’t—_ ”

“This isn’t a punishment,” Karkat says, and you know it comes out angry because he can’t bear to let it come out teary.  “ _You didn’t do anything wrong._ But you—you have to stay with us.”

Slowly—so slowly, too slowly—Gamzee slumps back down.  His sobbing breaths even out, his hands relax at his sides.  You step up, worried, thinking him gone again, but like she hears the thought Megido shakes her head at you.

“…he’s just sleeping,” she says.  “He needs it.  We’re getting all the food and water down his throat we can, and I’m keeping him in his body so he can heal, but it’s a slow process.  I don’t think it’s ever been attempted before either!  Since the whole thing is really just unprecedented—so even if he dies, we still make history!”

Karkat goes pale, pure grey.  You feel a growl snap up tight and ready in your throat.  She sees and amends.  “—which he won’t, obviously.  We’ve already got him on the mend.  Geez, you’d think death was some big, awful thing!”

“You think death’s so _light an issue,_ how about I—” you start, and Karkat puts his hands on your arm and squeezes to distract. 

“We have to let Gamzee sleep,” he says, and you know he’s putting your attention some other where than cocky-ass rusties but your eyes go to Gamzee’s face in its tired peace and you can’t care.  “Let’s go.  We can debrief to her Condescension.”

“I’ll text you if anything changes,” Megido says, and smiles with her weird, mud-sucker teeth all flat and straight and strange.  “This is good!  This is a step forward.” Karkat gives her a look.  She looks back, and then rolls her eyes.  “—no,” she says, like you’re being dumb wrigglers and she has to soothe and reassure.  “…I don’t think he’s going to die.”

“Better fucking not,” you growl, and then Karkat is turning sharp on his heel and marching toward the door and Uderak is following fast like he thinks he’ll be damned if he stays alone in the room with your matesprit, and you glare at her one last time and follow their small shapes out into the light. 

You stop, when you get outside, and for a second it feels like there’s something to be said here.  For a second, like you should make some speech, some gesture.  Like all of you are waiting for one of you to know what to say.

You look, each of you at the other two, and then slowly each of you turns and you go your separate ways.

\--

\--

It’s full day when you go down again.  The business of the church has been too long waiting and you’ve been dealing with the built up backlog for hours now, hashing out fights and dealing dispensation and signing off orders with your blessing.  Consecrated a new preacher for services.  Taken more than a couple of questions, _where’s brother Makara_ and let know to your most trusted interrogators that you got new Flesh for rending.  Just a one or two got their recall on of your first rout of the cult; they bow lower, offer you condolence you don’t make answer to. 

“I’ll pray for you,” says Inquirer, honest like he isn’t ever night to night, and bows out.  “Good morning, Highblood.”

And among matters big and slow and solemn, you deal with the wrigglers.  It’s a joy always, seeing them come stumbling in, creeping up to you with shining eyes and all but forgetting their courtesies for awe of your throne room.  You lean forward to look down kind on them, and you listen to the voice of the new. 

Tonight, the voice of the new wants Vantas.

Feeder Vantas.

You stare at the wrigglers gathered up small in front o you, and let the thoughts run round in your pan without showing or saying aloud.  _Feeder Vantas,_ they say.  _We wanted to learn off of_ Feeder Vantas, _couldn’t find where or what he does but he’s a funny little shouty motherfucker your lordship, sir, and we wanted…_

“Hm,” you say, and nod like it’s the most serious of unfunny concern.  “He does get his come and go on, little motherfuckers.  Makes it hard on kin looking to get their schoolfeed on.”  You stop a second, but the pitch spark in you pushes a little and you gotta add, holding the laughing down deep in your thorax, “—you see him, you follow him.  Learn off him as he goes.  Teaches on the walk, that Feeder Vantas.  He’ll get his shout on, test if you wanna stay for real, but you just keep on him.” 

“How’ll we know him to be onboard…?”

“Figure it out,” you say, patient enough but steady and firm with them, and they duck their heads.  “Use the family, and you got two-thousand eyes.  Use the family, little brother, and you got just about half a thinkpan.  I ain’t here to fix your shit for you.”

This is going to piss him off so bad, you cannot fucking wait to see.  They bow out and back away, and you are left to use time for yourself.

Gamzee’s block is locked up tight, and it sets a seed of ease  in you to open each lock and set it behind you.  He’ll be let out as soon as he wants, but for now when he’s hurting and weak, he’s kept away safe.  Untoxxic is waiting in the outer block when you come in, and they look up with tired eyes and quirk a grin at you.  “He’s awake,” they say, but there’s less than celebration in their voice.  They sound…strange.  “But he’s still not well, lord.  He’s—ch-changed.  But my war—wuh—work is done.”

“And thanks for your service,” you say, and knock horns.  They grin back.  “You’ve done good work here.”

“New and strange, all he’s gotten h—gotten hh…” they give that one up.  “The d-drugs he got gabe.  Gave.  Not much new under the moons for m-me but nnnhere he is.  Over-fucking-achieving.”

“You’re a credit.” 

“Credit enough I got your b-backup next time I fuck with inq—innnquirer?”

“What, you gonna put dye in his follicle-exfoliant again?”

“I need his door c-cold—door code.”

You gotta make a clear roll of your eyes at that, but you’re smiling the same.  Hell, you do owe.  “One time,” you allow.  “He’ll change it again after, but I’ll do you up the one time at least.”

“Done.”  They walk on past you to the door—stop and look back.  “…Lord.”

“Mm?”  You’re already there to go in, but their voice brings you halted. 

“…strange things got done on his thi—th—thinkpan,” they say, and bow their head so not to see your face.  “He’s been changed.  I don’t know how l…how lllong for.”

Your acid sac does something entirely motherfucking unpleasant.  “I’ll see to him,” you say.

“Full understanding on that you will,” Untoxxic says, and turns again, keeps walking.  Their voice echoes back to you, soft as they fade off into the shadows outside.  “… _but be ready._ ”

You get yourself ready, and you step inside.

You were expecting Gamzee lying down, weak and shaken.  And weak and shaken he is still but you’re surprised to see he’s up, sitting on the mediculler’s platform.  His whole body is nothing but bones.  His lips are dry and cracking.  His eyes are shadowed so he looks barely alive, a corpse on its feet. 

When he looks up at you his face loses its dark cast a little, but no more than a little.  He gets the barest twitch of a smile.  Even that much shakes and breaks away. 

“You see me again,” you say, and you get yourself talking so soft, like you’re at vigil.  “Fucking _praise._ ”

He nods.  Slow.  Tired. 

“I’m back,” he says, and you don’t know if he means back to the fleet or back to his body.  Takes a deep breath and lets it out.  He’s so small and hurt and precious and you finally have him back.  When you step in he looks up at you, and his eyes are so tired you have to pull him closer. 

You kiss him and he moves a little.  His lips are soft for yours, let you do what you want.  But his hands don’t rise.  He doesn’t return a kiss.  His breath is slow and tight up against your mouth. 

“…little brother,” you say, and the soft words don’t make him smile.  He blinks and for a long second it’s like he forgets to have his eyes open again.  “Gamzee. What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, slow.  Listless like he can’t hardly bring himself to do it.  “… _nothing,_ ” he says.

“After all you’ve seen?”  You touch his face.  His lips are cold.  He lets you touch him as you like, doesn’t move to kiss your fingertips as sometimes he used.  Doesn’t smile, doesn’t show sign of hurt at the reminder.  “After all those—all they did to you?  Can you tell me that, Gamzee, really and motherfucking truthfully, that you don’t feel a thing wrong?”

“ _…nothing,_ ” he says, and bows his head back down again.  “…I don’t—I don’t feel.  Anything.”

Your hand goes tighter where it rests around his on his lap—a claw drags accidental at his skin.  He looks down at it and his hand rests slack and unmoving in your hold. 

“…so far off,” he says, quiet and numb.  “Can’t…hardly tell it’s there.”

Fuck.

_Fuck._

He drops his eyes back to the floor.  When you reach down and pick up both his hands, he lets his hands hang limp in yours.  His eyes are far away. 

“…should feel something,” he says, slow and absent, like it’s a far-off concern.  “I wanted to kill him.”

His hands twitch.  He blinks long and slow.  His hands still again.

“Kill who?”

“Uumbrage.” His voice is flat.  So wrong and dead.  His lips are so sore and cracked—he starts to say something but his voice cracks into a cough. 

“Drink a bit, little brother.” 

He nods, reaches to the water by the platform’s side and lifts it up to himself with hands that shake.  Stops and holds it and breathes.

You feel it coming a split second early.  He looks up at you a second, opens his mouth like he’s gonna say something and then sharp and sudden he’s spasming up up tight all over, twisting and curling in like a scared grub.  The water drops away from his hands, clatters off on the floor as he shakes, but you’re not looking at that, couldn’t give less of a shit.  He freezes up when you take hold of his arms, then he slumps into your hold, breathing harder.

“You okay?”  Words not big enough for your worry over him.   You hand search him over for something to fix, but not a thing is there to find.  Even the wounds on his fronds are healing well.  His snapped wrist is wrapped neat and tight and clean, and you recall sudden and sharp how he looked at you so long ago when you bent his arm back and he pushed into it and broke himself on you.  The snap of his bones.  He’s been broken now again by hated hands. 

He looks up at you and raises one shoulder, half a shrug, like more would be too much.  Looks back down.

“Brother,” you say, and you know the words are selfish, are no help to him at all even as they come out your mouth.  “ _Talk_ to me.”

And for a second you see him try, for a second you see his hands clench up and his mouth begin to open and he looks like he’s going to speak to you—and then he slumps.  Then he lets it go.

“I can’t,” he says.  “…not today.”  He looks up, slow and steady and not even sad.  “…I’m so tired, big brother.”

Messiahs but you wish you knew what to tell him.  Wish you knew how to _fix_ this.

“Then sleep, little brother,” you say, and kiss him one last time again.  He still makes no move to return the touch, but still he doesn’t pull away.  “…back to sleep.”

He nods and eases himself back down , lying still and quiet, looking up at the empty air above him.  Closes his eyes, and  a second later he’s breathing slow, deep and steady.  You feel out for his thinkpan, and he’s not dreaming but you can feel them easing in on his pan.  Just like that, asleep.

You go with trouble in your pan and worry in your pusher, and reach your block uneasy and unsettled with his tired eyes looking back at you in your pan.  You fall into your ‘coon, and you don’t hardly remember hitting the slime.


	28. I Don't See Sin

The empress wants your bit of the story before the moons are rising the next night.  When you don’t answer comm she makes herself known by setting off all manner of unruly riot on your screens and alarms, lights up your whole room flashing and wailing at you like you’re under attack from all which ways at a time.  She gets her briefing, uncharitable as you might be with words so early and woken so rude.  You don’t make mention of the helpfulness of her lowbloods, but she asks questions so pointed and you figure she knows what a help they were.  Karkat won’t have sold his squad short in the report he was giving.

“And how you doin’, sugargrub?” she asks when you’re done talking.  “You want me to swim on over there?”

For just a second, you consider.  Consider the welcome relief of her comfort, and then the wanton weakness it would bring out in you.

“No,” you say, globes-out lying right to her face.  “You stay put, I got this locked the fuck down.”

She squints at you, then raises up her eyebrows and shrugs you off like you’re nothing to worry her.  “…’kay,” she says.  “If you spray so.”

“And so I do,” you say, growling still.  “I got this.”

“Shore.”  She pouts out her lip, like you offend her to turn down her offer.  “I ain’t confinced, but I got bigger fish to fry right now.  But I’m comin’ down on your bass somenight soon, angler.”

The thought on what that might mean, _coming down on your ass_ , puts a shudder up your back.  You just fucked yourself out a night before but still you find your mouth dry at the thought.  If she claws you content or kills you with kindness you’re getting’ in over your head with her and you know it well and sure.  She’s tired of you blowin’ her off. 

Well, you’ll handle that when you handle it. 

Karkat comes out of Gamzee’s recuperation block as you come down, and you know right the second you see him there’s something wrong.  The same as was wrong last night, you hope and don’t hope both together.  You hate to see him so, but motherfuck if he changes it could be to some worse way as before. 

“He’s still not there all the motherfuckin’ way,” you say, and it ain’t a guess.  He looks up at you sharp.

“You knew?”

“Started when he woke up first, yesterday,” you say, and oh yeah, you didn’t never actually get the motherfucking information off in his direction, did you?  Ah well. 

“And you didn’t _tell me_?”

You were fair motherfuckin’ distraught of it yourself, for what that’s worth and not that you’ll say so to him.

“Figured you’d find out sooner rather than later,” you say, like it ain’t no thing, and he gapes at you and then wrings at the air like he wishes he had fronds at your throttle-stem.  “Don’t get like that, little mutant.”

“He’ll barely talk to me,” Karkat says, and the words are hurting.  “He talked to you, right?  But I tried, I—he won’t _talk_ to me!”

“…you’re his moirail,” you say, and think on how his hands twitch and then settle again, how you see him flicker and then die away.  “You’d have him talk on things he don’t feel ready for talking about.”

He groans and tears at his hair, pulls so hard it’s gotta hurt.  “I’m his moirail!”  he repeats, “—and he’s got to talk about this!”

“But seems so far as I can see he ain’t ready to.”

He sniffs and scrubs angry at his eyes.  “… _I’m sick of not knowing_ ,” he says, and you know by his tone he knows his selfish sorry state.  “… _I have no idea what they fucking_ did _to him, what if…_ ” his shoulders bow and stoop.  “…what if he never wants me again?”

“What if he doesn’t?” 

He looks up at you like you hurt him, and it’s despite the will of your pan you feel a little ache of want at the look.  Not as sweet as hurt of the body, but of you would like to see him cry some day.  Not like this, not over this, but your body’s not all up and caught on to that, apparently. 

…but…you do know how to hurt.

“What if they ruined you for him,” you ask again.  “What then?”

“It doesn’t matter.”  He shakes away the thought, tries to.  “I’ll still be pale for him, we can fix this.”

“You’re scared you can’t.”

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

“They touched him gentle like you do, now your hands might be theirs—”

“I said _shut up_ you sack of shit!”

“Does it hurt to hear?”  You step up to him, and he backs away at the way you look at him.  Let your voodoos flash a little in your eyes, aimless fear in the air.  “You hurting, little mutant?”

“You—” he steps away again.  Voice breaks.  “You _know_ I am.  Stop it you fucking _freak,_ just—”

“What would you do to get away from it?”

He stares at you.  Opens his mouth, and then closes it to glare at you. 

“… _if you’re getting off on this,_ ” he says, and he’s got fury and broken sorrow in his voice.  “ _I’m flipping platonic on you._ ”

“Listen to the words I’m saying at you, Vantas.”

“Answer the FUCKING QUESTION—”

“LISTEN TO ME.”

Your voice comes loud over top of him, echoes around the block, startling even at your own self.  Karkat stops, breathing hard, eyes all washed-over red and wet and bright.  His teeth are bared-white in the dim. 

“Listen,” you say again, and for all you’re putting it together a little at a time the words are strong and fast and quiet.  You find them as you say them.  “ _If you were that scared, if you got_ hurt _by all as should have been good to you,_ what would you do to make it stop?”

He stares.  Maybe he starts to motherfucking comprehend, you don’t have time to stop and wait and see.  Keep pushing. 

“If you found a spot where you didn’t have to feel about it, if a motherfucker could _numb_ and soothe and hold it off—”

“He can’t fix it by just— _not thinking about it,_ ” Karkat says, but he doesn’t say it like he’s denying.  He says it like he knows the truth of what you say. 

“But he’s not ready to hurt all on top of how he just did.”  You say it like you know, and hope you aren’t reading wrong.  You never know.  You realized so long ago, you’d never know if you were doing right, never again.  But it does wear on you some nights.  _If I put my family forward and Meenah sends them planet-side, how many are coming back?  If I leave this fight be will it settle or send kin out searching revenge?_

_If I let him rest and keep himself numb, will he ever come back?_

You got no answers, and it is…fatiguing.  It wears and wearies. 

“Leave him be,” you say.  “Let him come to us when he’s got all set up in his pan for it, not before.  Don’t push him now.”

And he looks at you long and slow, and breathes, and looks away.

“…okay,” he says.  “Fine.  Fuck, sure, why not.”  And then, as you start to move past him, “—are you still going in?”

“Sure,” you say, and if you don’t let show how you hate the thought to see him again so bent and numbed, that’s just a single thing more you ain’t motherfucking telling.  “Not gonna leave him in there like he is.  He’s gotta know we’re still family for him and all.”

For all you can say that, there’s not too much for doing when you get in.  Gamzee is laid down, curled away from the door.  His thoracic struts show through his back, clear and sharp and starved.  When you come to him and run your hand through his hair, he don’t even jump at the touch.  Just lies there and breathes and shows no sign like he knows or cares you’re there.

He is hurting and not hurting, and so he stays.  Four nights you can’t get him to eat—Karkat manages it, in the end, messiahs only get to know how.  The first touches of his starving-thin boniness fade away off him just a little, but still the touch of death stays on him, in the hollows of his face and in his eyes, fearful to see.  Makes it a week after rescue, and still he lies or sits and stares ahead and far away, all still and silent like he’s gone somewhere far off.  Sometimes you find him locked up in jerking, shaking fits, fled away out his pan again—he always comes back at the end now, lies there all splayed out and limp and his eyes weep but no sign of feeling to go with it makes show on his face.  No distress in him, no pain.  Just tears from a wellspring not motherfucking there. 

Once you come in and he shakes in his sleep, taken of daymares, curled up in on himself.  You shake him and he wakes up and for a second there is such motherfucking _fear_ in him.  Then he pulls away and he’s gone.

It’s coming up on holiday, on the fourfold nights, on all manner of things you can’t keep straight without a list, and still he sits.  He stays.

You come see him every day.  Sometimes in afternoon before you do your work, sometimes at day when you’re about to head up to your block, and he never turns you away and don’t ever say an unkind word, but not either does your little brother reach for you.

“Karkat come down to see you?”

He almost every time nods for that one.  Karkat comes and goes, but yet whenever he can be he makes a visit.  You respect him the more for it—he’s left shaking every time, impatient and twisted up in motherfucking _fear_ like the kind you’re not letting yourself get to.  It does truly and deeply hurt the little motherfucker to come here and do as he does, and yet does he do anyway. 

“You eat yet?”

Gamzee nods again.  It’s been a week and a bit, yet, and still there’s starvation clinging to his skin, drawing him out tight.  He looks better, though.  Looks stronger. 

“They’re lookin’ for you in chapel,” you tell him, fight with all your strength to not push with the words.  If he ain’t ready, let him be.  “They missed having you.”

He looks down, away from you.  “…They don’t want me there,” he says, slow and quiet and each word so careful.  Each word perfect and calm.  “…motherfuckin’ kill the holy riot like this.”  He doesn’t say it so like he blames himself, like he might have done before—just saying.  Putting it out to be seen, flat and even and dull.

“They do want you there.”

He blinks slow.  Raises his shoulders and drops them like they’re too heavy. “…hurts,” he says. 

It’s the first feeling he’s told you since he woke numb.  You go still, watching him, but he says no more than that.  Goes no deeper. 

“Chapel will?”

“They will.”  His hands twitch in his lap.  Tiny hot thrill goes dancing up your posture column.  “To see.”

“Your kin ain’t gonna hurt you,” you say, guessing, and you know by the tiniest twist of his mouth that’s not what he meant.  “—you know that.  You know.  So what’s to fear, letting them see you now?”

He stops.  Licks his lips, opens his mouth, closes it again.  That slightest little hint of something building in him, like he has something to say.  Like he don’t want to. 

“ _Gamzee,_ ” you say, and for all you try to keep your voice soft, not pushing, it comes out soft and hard and deep, the softest bit of a flushed chirr, and he jerks and wets his lips again.  His fins are moving, just twitching like he’d want to spread them, threaten off some enemy.  After the blankness, just that tiniest moving is a blessing.  “Why’d you hide away from your own family?  _Talk to me._ ”

“It’ll break,” he says, and there’s a twist to the words like a warning, like a plea, and you can’t tell if he’s asking you to stop or begging you to keep pushing.  “There’s—something.”  Disjointed, blurred, the words don’t make sense but there’s something holding him back and all you can do is trust your gut.  Time to do like you ever did again.  Time to let him hurt.

“ _Tell me,_ ” you say, and you’re breathless with it, the pity you got for him. Even if he never remembers how to feel for you again, even if he’s lost like this forever, even if it hurts when he can’t feel for you like you do for him— _messiahs_ , you would swear on whatever blessing ever got set on your soul that you will love this boy.

He looks down at his feet as he sits.  Closes his eyes, like he’s thinking back. 

“… _woke up and they already put it in me,_ ” he says, like he’s telling a story that some other fucker suffered.  “I could…taste it.  It all hurt.  Hurt…strange.  Not real hurt but just…”

It’s not the answer to the question you asked, not so far as you can see, but it’s something and you’re sure as fuck not cutting him off.  You wait.  Don’t let your fool mouth open to interrupt, and for long seconds you think he’s lost in his pan again.  But then he breathes on out again, looking for the words.

“…too much,” he finishes. 

You shift just enough to move the palm of your hand in little slow circles on his back.  Let him keep going. 

“Didn’t stay out of the dark more than minutes,” he says.  “They showed me…” for the first time, a sharpness in the way he moves—he shudders.  He flinches from it.  “— _showed me—_ ”

He stops.  He breathes in and out and in and out.

“They put—their colors in me,” he says, slow and still again, and he touches his gills.  They’re un-marked now.  None of your little silver hoops and studs, your purple horn-bars, none of their blasphemy colors marked in him.  There’s little pits in his horns where the studs used to be.  “They marked their faces on me, without—my say.”  And just for a second, there’s that break in the numb dull sound of his voice.  Just a moment, it breaks with something strong and bitter. He fights himself a second, and then it’s gone again, and you touch him gentle and watch.  Pray like hell. 

“They touched you,” you say, quiet, calm, just stating how it is, and his grip tightens on you a second. 

“I didn’t want them to.”

You don’t talk back.  Let him breathe, harder now.  Faster.

“I didn’t fucking _want_ them to,” he repeats, a little louder, and there’s a hint of strength in the words now, still quiet, still flat, but there’s sullen  force to them.  “—not on my face, not on my— _fins,_ my hair my horns my mouth not on my body I didn’t mother _fucking_ ask for that—”

You let your hand move in his back as he talks, faster and faster, more violent, and it’s a joy just to hear the life in him even if it’s life that comes with pain.  Maybe that’s been part of the dead calm in him, you think.  Maybe their drug was in him dulling and dimming his spirit but maybe he let it be.  Maybe a motherfucker couldn’t bear to think on it, what they did, so he let himself be still and numb and not think or feel or know.  It’s a lot to understand, the cruelty he’s felt.  You got a feeling you’ll get far less regret in you for the slaughter of your own blood color this time than when first they came to you. 

“Hard on you,” you say, just easing, just pushing him on, and he hisses through his teeth.  “Real hard, little brother.”

“—even when I couldn’t see them and lights stabbed at my motherfucking ganderbulbs I _felt_ them,” he spits,  hoarse from not talking, rough with the anger he’s been hiding deep away, and you can see the hints of fin on his spine flare up and spread, threatening, warning off a danger that’s not there.  “—all motherfucking _on_ me, kissing at my fucking feet and at my hands and whispering _did you see them did you see them_ like I was there to help them—”

“They treated you like you were theirs already,” you say, as the realization comes to you, and for a flash of a second he shows his teeth like he’s going to growl.  “Like there was no point even trying to convert you to them.”

“I _wasn’t_!”  It’s a yell, and it hurts to hear him so upset but you want to sing praise just for the burn in his eyes.  “I never was, I—they never listened, they just did what—d-did what they motherfucking _liked_ and all my screaming—all my—”

He’s shaking now, trembling so hard like something in him that he’d been holding back all this time is snapped wide open.  He wraps his arms around, holding on himself, eyes all wide and far off at the memory of the fear. 

“ _Faces all painted,_ ” he chokes out.  “—eyes like mine, fuck, eyes like mine all holy motherfucking colors of Messiahs’ chosen trolls, looking at me like I was something for them to use—rather have the—the torture and the dark and the hot places again all alone and they kept saying at a brother _it’s okay you’re okay_ but it fucking WASN’T MOTHERFUCKING _OKAY—”_ He chokes and shudders and goes quiet again.  Breathes hard and fast and holds himself and your pusher is breaking for him.

“… _Gamzee,_ ” you say, praying he won’t sink away from you again, and then you just go “—hff—!” because he dives forward and wraps his arms around your thorax.  “— _Ahhh, little one…_ I—sorry.  Should’ve got you faster I should’ve—I fucked up, beloved, you got took away from us, you weren’t safe I didn’t keep you _safe_ —”

He shakes his head, but he can’t seem to make words—he clings.  Shakes.

“… _but it’s okay now,_ ” you say, because you know he hates to see you like that—hates to see you break down when he needs you strong and not changing.  “…’s over now, your family, your only true real-ass motherfucking family got you safe and they got claws and fangs to hide you away behind.  We got you.”  Kiss his neck, his shaking shoulders, his horns, the soft beat of his pusher in the hollow behind his ear.  “ _We got you back.  They can’t hurt you now.  Can’t hurt you.”_

“ _But it hurts,_ ” he says, tight and small and pitiful-soft.  “ _It hurts._ ”  And then, as you’re opening your mouth in pity, his hands clench up tight in your shirt.  “… _I’m gonna kill them_.”

A hiss, burning with holy bloodlust, aching with the hurt done him and his _hate_.  You’ve heard him hurt before, heard and seen him regretting and pained, but never with this deep hurt that demands for repaying.  Never hate that looks for revenge.  You can’t see his eyes, but you can almost feel the red-hot burn of them.

“… _we’ll kill them,_ ” you promise him, and squeeze him closer.  “…once we’re through with them.”

The cruelty softens him, and you can see your own smaller self in him and that hurts, unexpected, sudden and sharp.  He’ll be kin-killer, so young.  Younger than you were.  Because they did to him first.  Because he was betrayed by what should’ve been good and money and now everything’s wrong. 

He shivers, and even that is a blessing.  He’s feeling again.  Feeling it all. 

“…we gotta get you dressed,” you say, and wrap him up in your arms to warm him with what little warm you got in you.  His skin feels icy.  “Cleaned and dressed and fed, get you feeling more yourself, little motherfucker.”

“You brought paints?” he says it vivid-sharp, urgent.  “You got some here?”

“Yeah.”  You didn’t hardly notice his face was bare.  Even bare-faced looks so right after their heretic shapes on his skin.  “You wanna paint up?”

“Yeah,” he says, and then “—no—I mean—fuck.  _Fuck_ fuck fuck—”  slams his head at your shoulder, sudden and hard, eyes squeezed shut, holds his head in his hands.  “—no, I want—”

“Whoa, whoa now, little one, easy.”

“You should.”

Takes you aback.  You blink and think and come to the thought, “… _I_ should paint you?”

His eyes mist wet and bright.  He nods and you remember his face when you found him, the spirals and the alien motherfucking shapes of it.  Think on them baring his face in front of all their hungry eyes to paint their signs and blasphemies on his skin.  Laying a brother so motherfucking bare.  The church that wasn’t kin, doing wrong by his holy face.  And here’s you, the church proper, the church _holy_ , and he’d put himself in your hands like that.

“… _oh, little brother,_ ” you say, and your pusher is breaking under the weight of your pity as you hold his face in your hands, touch his bared cheeks and the heavy shadows under his eyes.  “ _Little brother, holy little brother—oh, beloved…”_

His eyes spill over at the words—he turns his face into your hand, his face crumples and he rocks back and forward, slow.  “ _—mmh,_ ” he gets out, and the word is broken apart and shaking.  “— _mmmmade—made me—ah…ask for it—_ ” he gasps in air, and his voice is rising and you can’t fucking bear how it hurts inside.  He’s so desperate that you know.  He’s so scared that you’ll think some part of this was his doing, that _any_ tiniest motherfucking SHRED of you would put _blame_ on him for their twisted-up backwards blasphemy.  “ _Didn’t I didn’t_ want, _I didn’t—they—said he’d leave me bare, I—I—I couldn’t—he said—_ fuck—”

You imagine it—being tied down, helpless, face all bare like a motherfucking spectacle of humiliation, being ripped out of yourself over and over and over and—

“…I know you didn’t,” you say, and kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his tired eyes, murmur it up against his skin.  “— _I know, I know, I know.  Not your fault, brother._ ”

“But I—!”

You stay quiet, wait for him to find the words as you take out your paints—he chews his lip as you start the white-grey of the mask, until you tap his mouth with a clawtip and he sighs out and lets it open and soft for you.  He looks for the words as you trace the shape of a mourning frown, a weeping eye. 

“…’ _but’ what?”_   You ask, soft as you fill the lines, and he jumps a little like he forgot you were talking.  A sharp arc that traces the line of his cheek, skeleton-thin, wasted away.  “…’but’?  You think you had some fault in this, some fault in getting took and chained down and _hurt_?  How do you have blame in this, little one?  How could you ever?”

“I—” his voice breaks, and he chokes on the words.  You hold his face as you put the last touches on him, work with a practiced hand over the flutter of his ganderflaps and the deep shadow under his eyes.  Even while your brush traces the line of his eye, a tear streaks through the still-wet paint, smears a teardrop right where you’d planned to paint one.  For just a second you stare, and you feel the moment balance miraculous on the tip of some great starry-ass scale somewhere.  And then he’s talking again, choking the words out.  “I said—told them I could see them, see their blasphemies I _fuckin’ testified_ I—I’m so sorry I’m sorry I should— _hhkh_ —should’ve just—let them—all the old martyrs, they wouldn’t ever have—”

Knocks the breath out of you.  _I should have let them kill me,_ he’s not saying.  _I should have died._

“ _You—_ ” you start, and it’s a breathless growl and he _flinches_ from you like he thinks you’ll hit him.  You gentle your voice as much as you can and more than ever you feel too big, too scarred, too rough to touch him.  Every inch of him is raw from their violation and your hands are too shaking-sharp.  “No, _no_ little brother, _no,_ fuck.  You led us right to them.  You suffered for the church, that’s not a motherfucking _failure_.  That’s worth praising.”

His eyes go wide, he looks at your face like you’re god. 

“… _I…spoke false,_ ” he says, like he doesn’t dare to believe.  “ _Heresy._ ”

“You said what they wanted to hear until you brought the church down on them to do what you  couldn’t.”  You turn his face up, a hand under the angle of his jaw.  It’s sharper than before.  He’s so thin, so fucking _worn_ , like he’s lived ten sweeps in the weeks he’s been gone.  Your little one has suffered.  Taken away from you, ripped apart from you and made to _suffer._   “…you knew you were lying?”

He nods, and you know he’s telling the truth.  He’s in confession to you.  It’s not in him to lie under that conviction, he’s got a faith in him too strong for that. 

“If you still feel fucked up about what you said, that’s between you and messiahs and you can say your repentances for that,” you say, and cup his face in your hands to press your pan to his and rock a little with him, real slow.  “… _but I don’t see heresy here._   I don’t see sin.”

His face goes bent and twisted.  He starts to breathe—chokes a sob and freezes there, shaking all over, holding himself on the edge.  Still and shaking and hurting too bad for words, and you reach out and pull him forward and up in your arms.

“ _Holiest motherfucking messiahs,_ ” you murmur down in his hair, and he chokes and jerks in your arms.  Great, huge, deep, hurting sob tears out of him.  Again.  Again, longer.  “ _I got some bit of regard from you that you’d lift me up so high over all this color and mayhem—this precious little brother—_ “ your voice breaks.  Your hand comes up and threads in his hair, you can still hold the back of his pan cupped in one palm and he shudders at the force of his sobbing.  “— _this brother—got hurt real bad.  Know you watched it, but you didn’t laugh and you_ had _him and you_ have _him and he led your faithful to burn out the rot that would have had him poisoned against you and he has such a mighty pain in him, holiest ones for what he feels he’s done unpleasing to you, you know he is so—_ ”

“ _—_ sorry _—!_ ” Gamzee gasps out for you, and that’s the last words he gets out, all the prayer he has in him to give, before he’s broken into pieces, wailing and crying and _broken_ at all the things they took from him and forced in instead, all the ways they got to him so deep in pan and pusher and soul.  You pray over him, constant and low and straight from the center of you, and he clings and gasps in air and sobs and screams and _cries_. 

You send Karkat a message one-handed, not ever stopping your flow—all you got space or time to send is _come_ , but you know he’ll do it.  He’ll be here.  At this time now, you’re connected.  You, king of colors, and this little upstart heretic’s get and your precious descendant who’s made for breaking, all bound up tight to each other.  A joke you are.  A fine fucking joke. 

You ain’t moved, still holding Gamzee minutes later when the door opens.  You don’t call or look up; you know Vantas will hear.  He’ll know. 

He don’t call out for you, ask why you pinged him—he shows up at the door and the way he looks at the wasted-up body curled up in your arms is everything hot and sweet and pale as white-hot steel.  The agony in him when he watches Gamzee cry calls back to yours.  The hurting when he looks up at you and you look back.  How fucking _helpless_ you both find yourselves.  Pitch you may be, but at quadrant-corners red as his blood and pale as fierce stars.

Karkat comes up—slides up next to you, and Gamzee whimpers and goes still a second, breathless, when a hot hand touches his neck—then he’s broken again.  Sobbing again.  Karkat don’t shoosh him, never says a word of soothing to make the crying stop.  Just runs his hands all across that too-thin, bone-jutted back, not too soft and not worshipping.  Frames the bones in his fingers like precious treasures made for his hands to hold.  The lines of his scars like they’re seams of gold.  Never a word as Gamzee cries and cries and cries.

He settles a little, after a long while.  You let him shake himself out.  Some shit is made for mourning.  Some things need a motherfucker to cry them away.  He still sobs sometimes, weak and trembling, but it slows until mostly he breathes.  His face fresh-painted is all a mess, wet all over and smeared.  You pull a cloth and dry a little, just little touches, so he knows his face is safe—he reaches up with a trembling hand and takes your wrist.  Winds his fingers in the cloth and tugs a little, and you let him.

He holds the cloth to Karkat, and Karkat stares at it and then at you and then at Gamzee with this look on his face like he might cry too, next.  His lips go tremble and shake. 

“…are you sure?”  He asks, and he sounds so fucking tender.  Like he knows, like even this blasphemous little motherfucker gets in the soul of him how unbearable the burden he’s being asked to pick up.  There’s a weight being put in his fronds and you think by his eyes that he knows. “I—fuck.  Are…are you sure?”

Gamzee don’t even answer words.  Smiles, shaking and small and stained all over with tears, and holds the rag out for Karkat to take.

You cradle him up against you as Karkat wipes away the paint you put on for him, and you feel like it’s right it should be this way.  Bringing him back to hive, bringing him in and close, painting and baring him as it should be.  As _he_ wants it.  By other hands maybe, but hands that love him and eyes that look on him gentle for who he is, not like he’s a pretty bauble to hang at the altar and decorate in their heretic colors.

And then Karkat brushes a finger past a swelled up split in Gamzee’s lip, and he jerks and throws off the touch.

Karkat pulls back right that second—Gamzee scrubs at his mouth with his hand—over and over, like the touch has left something dirty he has to get off, and his back shakes when he sobs again.  Just once.  Twice.  Three times.  Then he falls still again.

“…Gamzee?”

He groans, fists up his hands in his hair and shakes his head.

“Gamzee, I’m—sorry.  Fuck, what did I do?”  Karkat’s hands touch him, and he’s not reverent with that shit.  Doesn’t treat him like Gamzee said they did, like he was some _thing_ to be touched only with fingertips and reverence.  He rubs Gamzee’s cold arms with hot palms.  He squeezes and pats and touches soft but firm and takes Gamzee’s face in rough warm fronds to turn him up and face him. 

“…Gamzee,” he says again.  “Look at me.  Look at me, okay?  Just me.  Tell me what I did so I know how to not fuck up.”

“ _He’d do that,_ ” he says, so quiet, and rubs his hand over his mouth again.  “… _right where the paint didn’t cover up just like he could touch it all and not care it was my_ face _it was my face,_ fuck _—_ ”

“I’m sorry.”  Karkat sounds so torn up of loving him, so desperate at the same time, scared Gamzee’s gonna go back away if he does wrong.  “Sorry—I won’t do that again, okay?  I didn’t know.  Fuck.”

“—‘s okay, I’m okay—”

“Keep telling me, fuck, just keep talking to me, okay?  I am listening so goddamn hard you’ve got no idea.”

Gamzee laughs again, short and wet and crooked in his throat, like the noise can’t quite come out right. 

“You wanna get dressed?”  Karkat pauses and holds before he dares reach out, pat short and sharp at Gamzee’s back.  “You’re freezing.  More freezing than usual.”

“…yeah,” says Gamzee, and brushes away careful at his eyes before he remembers his paint is cleaned away and just scrubs at his face, all purple nose and swelled up eyes.  “…’kay.”

“I brought your casual and your uniform,” says Karkat, and pulls his sylladex open.  “You care which one you wear?”

Gamzee blinks and then thinks.  “…block wear,” he says finally.

“You shameless pale floozy,” says Karkat, all mock-aggrieved, and Gamzee looks taken back and then he lets out another one of those short, painful little laughs.  It’s been hundreds of sweeps since a motherfucker’s wearing of something not imperial-issued was a come-on.

“The both of you oughta get in deep hot motherfuckin’ water if we’re picking on that,” you point out, and reach to flick one of Karkat’s horns.  He’s so distracted he doesn’t expect, and it makes him yelp like you shocked him and jump all over.  Goddamn but you wanna do bad things to those.  “Two of you all brushed-up hair and showin’ off your hornbeds like fuckin’ hired piles.”

“Did you just call me a _slut_?”  Karkat sounds impressed and furious somehow both together.

“Said you look like one.”

“You giant hypocritical _motherfucker—_ ”

Gamzee breaks up your argument pretty damn good by taking that second to try sliding his legs off the table and then going down like a falling tree.  Karkat dives to catch his arm, and you stick a hand out to catch his weight, and together the both of you lift him up, let him balance on his feet.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Gamzee pants, and trembles at the strength it takes to stand.  “ _Fuck, holy shit._   Karkat, can—clothes?  _Mother_ fucker, whoa.”

You help and hold as Karkat helps him into his shirt, into a pair of his old drawstring pants and a big black jacket he huddles down into as soon as it’s on, breathing hard and slow.

“… _I’m cullbait, best friend_ ,” he says, and leans heavy on your arm, all shake and tremble, as Karkat straightens his shirt up and steps back.  “— _mnnh—_ s-sit me down, gimme a sec—”

He falls back on his platform the second you get him near, breathes all hard and sharp like he’s been running days and nights unrested.

“… _fuck_ ,” he says, between one breath and the next.  “ _Oh—fuck._ ”

“You’re not cullbait.”

Gamzee laughs, harsh and soft and without mirth.  Sounds wrong, from his mouth.  Too old and too hurt and too bitter by far. 

“Can’t hardly walk,” he says, like he’s counting off points in a list.  “—can’t use the frond he broke, can’t get my thinkpan in _fucking_ order, can’t can’t _can’t_.  You sayin’ a drone wouldn’t look at me once and take my head right off my throatstem like it wasn’t no thing?  Best friend I’m dumb but I ain’t _stupid._ ”

“That won’t happen,” you say, and he looks up at you with tired eyes. 

“Nah,” he says.  “For you two, it won’t. For the fishbitch, yeah, it won’t.  But if I wasn’t me, it sure as fuck would.  Maybe it ought.”

Your grip goes tight and hard so fast he winces.  Stares up at you as you breathe and look back, as the words echo. 

“ _No_.”

“…Kurloz—”

“Don’t say that, don’t you _ever_ say—”

“Hey, quit it!  You’re scaring him you enormous globe-bursting fuck-pod—”

“Brother, I should be dead,” he says again, and Karkat winces too, at the words.  His face fills up with pain.  The noise you make ain’t got a name, just _quit it stop it stop saying that._   “All rights and ways, I should.”

“No,” you say, and it’s sharp and growling because he’s feeling now and that’s supposed to mean he’s getting _better_ but here he sits, tells you to your face he shouldn’t be alive.  Tells you he should be killed for what _they did to him_ and you hate how sure he seems and how you know it’s what Alternia wants of him.  This is what trolls are supposed to be.  This is what you _should_ want from him, but quadrants do motherfucking make fools of all.  Even you.

“Do you think _I_ should be dead?”

Karkat says the words like they’re made to cut.  You look over at him, shocked sudden by the words.  Gamzee shudders away from it.  “No,” he says, like it hurts to think on.  “No, no no, not you!  Just—a motherfucker’s not up to himself now and—”

“I’m too small for my caste, I barely pupated alive, my horns are useless and my blood is completely freakish,” Karkat pushes, and Gamzee shudders down at the rebuke in his voice.  “That should mean I get culled too, right?”

“No,” says Gamzee again, over and over, hurting and scared just to think it, “No, no, Karkat, brother, don’t even say that.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”  He’s sharp with his hurting.  “You’re saying it to me!  Do you know how much it hurts, hearing you buy into that shit?  Well now you do!  Okay?!”

“Settle your ass down,” you growl at him, and he pulls back, still breathing hard, teeth all bare.  “You made your point.”

“Sorry,” Gamzee says, convulsive and broken, and his eyes are wet again, his voice is choking-thick. “—sorry, fuck, sorry—”

Karkat’s breath catches as Gamzee curls up on himself, crying again, shaking again.  He’s so used to yelling, snapping and having Gamzee laugh it off and you know—fuck, you know he wants to go back to what things were, and true gentle comes hard to him.  But anger still sparks at you, hate still needles. 

“No—no, I shouldn’t have yelled,” Karkat says, and there’s a desperate hurt in his voice.  “Shh, I fucked up, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

And he looks up at you.  He looks up at you and he’s so young, and you can see in his eyes, _help I’m sorry I don’t know what to do._

Why the fuck he figures you know what to do either, you got no fucking idea.  But you comb your hand through Gamzee’s hair and wipe tears off his cheeks, and he looks up just a little.

“He ain’t mad at you,” you say gentle.  “You know, little brother, you know he’s scared for you.  Hear you talk so, like you’d…like you want…”

Now it’s you who’s silent, who can’t find words, but you know he knows.  _Like you want to leave us.  Like you want to die._

“Can you tell me you’re safe?”  you say, and he looks up at you sharp and hurt at the question, at the worry.  “Can you?  That might for real and true kill off the last of my laughter, little one.  Think you might go a good ways to taking me down after you, if you…went away.”

“I—no!”  he says, and for a second your choke goes tight like a strangling noose.  “No, I’d never—” and he winces, and you know he regrets to say “never”, that he can’t put the thought from his pan.  He can’t say “never” right now.   “…I wouldn’t.”

“Promise me,” says Karkat, and reaches out, takes Gamzee’s face in his hands to turn it up, looks him in the eyes.  “Promise?”

“Brother, you know I…” he doesn’t look up at you—looks at Karkat, so quiet.  “… _know I…I don’t want…_ ”

“I know.”  Karkat sighs.  “But I also know you’re scared right now.  I don’t know if you’re more scared of how things are than you are of dying, but I don’t want to take that chance.  Get that through your thick bone-hull, you unbelievable shitshow of a clown, if you hurt yourself in any way that hulking pervert you call a partner wouldn’t do to you I’ll—”

“Cry?”  You throw out before you can catch it, and he sputters and throws you a glare fit to cut through hull-metal. 

“What?!  No!”

But it was set in real truth and Gamzee knows that.  You see the truth take him, more even motherfucking so than whatever lecture and aberrance of speech Vantas was gonna unload on him.  You would suffer.  Karkat would cry.  If he can’t stay for his own sake, maybe he’ll stay for that.

“So?”

“Get me outta here,” Gamzee says, fervent as praying, and gets himself up again.  He’s still weak, leans on Karkat with the one arm and you with the other.  “A motherfucker can’t even handle all as what it smells like in here.” 

“Yeah.”  Karkat makes like to duck under his arm and give him a lift—he’s so little he can’t no more.  Gamzee’s legs would have to go out under him before he could lift him at all.  Karkat sees you watch him—gives you a finger and put his arm round his moirail’s waist instead, presses up by his side.  Gamzee gives him a look just a second like he’s been startled off, and then he blinks and smiles real cautious.  “Let’s get out of here.”

\--

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you feel washed the fuck out like a painting left unsealed.  It’s real hard staying at where and who you are, but you’re more scared yet of how you went under like that than you are of the ache in your legs and the tired ache in the core of your thinkpan.  Feels like you got weights on your horns, pullin’ your nug down so you’d like nothing better than lying down on the floor and sleeping here.  But sleeping means dreams, and fuck if you ain’t motherfucking terrified of that too, so you walk on and hold onto Karkat and nod whenever he stops talking to you.

“…little brother.”

Kurloz’s hand surprises you on your shoulder, surprises you hard enough you jump and flare up before you know who he is, all wide-out fins and hissing fang-open snarl.  Karkat jerks round to reach for you, but you’re already pushing it back down by the second he touches your shoulder.  It’s fine.  This is totally o-motherfuckin’-kay.

“Sorry,” you get out your mouth, even though it comes out round your fangs, and Karkat lays hands on your arm.  It’s all he can reach—you forgot how little he was, how small still.  “Motherfucker wasn’t expecting.”

“You don’t have to fucking apologize for that,” Karkat fusses, and you have to give him half a laugh for that, he tries so hard at protecting you.  “He should know better than to just grab people out of nowhere, we’re fucking _trolls_.  Not some kind of soft-shell alien sponge-suckers getting touchy-feely in their weird alien residence husks.”

Kurloz snorts, reaches back out and puts his hand on your other shoulder, and this time you let him.  There were cold hands, but none so big as his, and there were small hands but none as hot as Karkat’s.  This, you figure, this you can just about bear, at least and smallest.  Them at least you can get through your head, don’t mean you no harm. 

“So where do you want to go?”  Karkat keeps an ocular out sharp as you walk; you hear footsteps off distant and flinch at the thought of more painted faces yet, and Kurloz glances down and then throws out a net of whispers.  You recall, sharp and sudden, being eight and new on fleet, getting pulled to one side by a big sister when the whispers came, _the King of Colors wants to walk undisturbed._   You stayed in the block until the feeling went, fading off to other parts. On the night-to-night you know Kurloz would let whoever come close, for all he might not honor them with words—but he doesn’t push off his fam.  But today—but for you—

“You don’t gotta,” you say, and Kurloz glances down to you and quirks up a brow.  His paint cracks around his eyes—he needs repainted.  Hasn’t been looking out for his own holy face. 

“…sure that’s wise?”

“Give me a motherfuckin’ face,” you say, and consider a second before you add on, “…here.”  He’ll try to paint you for mourning, if you let him—signal all who see _hurt has been here.  Messiah-tested._   You don’t want kin poking their sniff-nodes around in good faith, looking for what they can do to help you.  You’ll see enough of that without the paint to draw them in. 

All that being said, holy fuck but it feels good to put lines on your own face again.  Your hands tremble as you put the paint down, and Kurloz narrows his eyes at you when he gets a sight of what you’re painting but he don’t say a word or step in.  It’s an old face, the face you came on-fleet with, one of the basic-ass Fools.  It’s a wriggler’s face, not fitting of your age or your esteem, and you close your eyes as you curve the lines around your eyes into a smile and remember being a wriggler, sopor on your fangs and holding your first paints, looking at your shaky mockery of holy face in the mirror, smiling as wide as the paint. 

Then you open your eyes, and you’re you again.  It feels good to be covered up.  You manage even a smile for your mates, watching you so keen, and they smile back at you, Karkat like it’s a fight he’s winning and Kurloz that small and crooked thing like a crack in his mask.  The gap where his front fang is gone is a precious thing to you, small and clear and present.  Treasure where you didn’t figure you’d find it and all. 

Miraculous.

“…let who’s gonna see see,” you say, and Kurloz hesitates another second and then nods and lets himself whisper back into his own thinkpan and settle back to his own horns.  The hum in the air goes quiet and vanishes away.

You’re expecting a moment quiet before anything happens from that, but it’s _seconds_ from when you feel him stop pushing that you hear the slightest sound of shifting feet.  Karkat hears them too—you feel him tense up to reach for his sickles, turning to look back behind you.

Then you hear him snort.

“Getting super _fucking_ creepy,” he says, and drops down his fronds again.  “Get out here and stop spying.”

Brother Uderak comes shuffling slow into your view, staring at the three of you like he’s not sure if he’s for real seeing you right.  You make like to smile, for all you’re pretty sure it comes out shitty.

“How long were you following us?” Karkat sounds yet amused.  Kurloz is watching all going down with his brows up so far as to stretch his paint, not smiling now there’s folk around to see but not displeased either.  Again like you have so many times before, you feel the distance of sweeps between you and him.  He watches you like an amusement of wrigglers all squabbling at grub’s first quadrants.

“Well?” 

Brother Verato shifts foot to foot.  “…only minutes,” he says, like a pupa caught by its lusus.  Kurloz huffs out the smallest breath and you know it’s him holding back a laugh but brother Uderak must think it some judgment because the motherfucker flinches from it and hurries on.  “—just felt his lordship goin’ through the ship and he…he was letting out _get gone_ so I figured…there’s only a couple reasons he’d keep us all away round this time.  And I was right!”  He says it proud and sudden-loud, like now not a single one of you can fault him.  “You’re awake!” 

“If you wanna call it that,” you agree, and hold out a hand for him—he comes right to you and squeezes you surprising-hard for his size.  “ _Uhf._ ”

“Sorry.”  Just a second he buries his face in your thorax—you let him, for all it makes disagreeable hints of shudder tighten you up inside.  You’re reminded, all sudden-like, of the little cultist as cared for you, almost.  Who told their heretic excuse of motherfuckin’ family to ease off you, who gave up secrets to you and sometimes made play at listening even a little.  The churn in your guts comes out as a growl.

Karkat is worked in between you and brother Uderak so fast you don’t see him coming, and your eyes fix on his, on the burning red of them.  You breathe deeper, hold it in your thorax—the growl fades off in stutters and stops. 

“ _Are you sure you want to do this_?”  he asks, sharp and hard.  “You should go up to your block, get some sleep—”

“ _No!_ ”

It comes out sharp, sudden-loud and cracked in half down the middle.  Karkat jumps back and Kurloz frowns and now they know you’re fucked up and you’re not getting out of it, _fuck_. 

“I don’t wanna sleep again,” you say before either one can make a question for you, “—I don’t want to motherfuckin’— _go_.”

“You’re not _going_ anywhere,” says Karkat, because he just motherfucking _doesn’t GET IT_.  “You need to rest—”

“Go find a motherfucker as _gives a fuck_ to preach at—!”

“Hey!  Hey now.”  Kurloz cuts over all, loud and clean and clear as real preaching.  You shiver down where you stand, struck and convicted real sharp and sudden, and he lowers his voice back down.  “—little brother, leave us.  For real this time and I’ll know if you don’t.”

For just a barest motherfucking second, it looks like your snakiest brother is gonna make argument.  Then he looks up at you and bows down his head at Kurloz, and he’s gone. 

“Now.”  Kurloz puts a hand on your shoulders each, one too big for Karkat’s shoulder and the other one strong on your sticking-out cartilage struts.  Messiahs all bless but you thought you were skinny _before_.  You look like a shadow-dropper now.  “Ain’t nobody gonna _make_ you sleep.  But it’s happening some time sooner rather than later.  You got needs as trolls do, little one.  _You_ …” to Karkat, “—stop pushin’ him.”

“It’s what I do,” says Karkat, and you hear under his voice the faintest tremble.  He doubts.  Pushing you is all he’s ever been good for, says that tremble, if pushing you hurts you now, the fuck is he supposed to do instead?  You’d help him if you could but you don’t fuckin’ know either and that’s the hard honest motherfuckin’ truth.  “You can’t just not deal with scary shit.  Believe me, I _tried_ hiding.  And you need to sleep.”

“I’d rather go to sermon,” you say, pleading, and Karkat thins up his mouth but you look to Kurloz instead.  “Please, biggest brother, just—I can motherfucking sustain, I’ll take it fine, I swear.”

Kurloz holds his peace for a long motherfucking time, considering you, looking you over.  When he finally speaks, he’s talking quiet, slow.  “…unholy noise,” he says, even.  “—to turn back a brother set on going to holy chapel.  Can’t be set straight.  You’ll go.”

Karkat throws up his hands and paces angry steps away from you, muttering growls at himself—you feel bad, some bit of you, but it’s drowned away under the relief.  No sleep yet.  No dreams, no…waking.  You’re still not sure, not the whole of you, that you’re really here, that if you go to sleep you won’t wake up in the dark laid out on too-soft cloth.  Or older and deeper under that new fresh wound, that you’ll wake in the dark and the heat, in chains less soft but no more welcome. 

Which leaves you a room of painted faces and cold blood to handle.  And that’s not real and totally _welcome_ right now either.  But you’d far rather see Kurloz preach honest scripture again than listen to your own thinking and the poison they left in you as still hasn’t motherfucking washed out.

“Speaking on,” Kurloz says, “—I gotta go grab my stuff, get straightened out.  You gonna get there fine?”

“I can get any fuckin’ place,” you say, and it comes out nettled on the sharp little stab of angry that wells up your throat.  Kurloz stays blank, but he blinks sudden and surprised.  Wasn’t expecting.  Well fuck, neither were you.  The anger sinks off, goes dead and cool again.  “—sorry.  Sorry, I…yeah, motherfucker, just go on with your bad self.  I’m good.”

Kurloz looks like there’s more as he wants to say, stuff he’d call you out on, but him and Karkat trade a look and instead he turns, holds his horns high.  Goes. 

“Tell me where we’re going,” Karkat says, and you can hear he still resents how you go to Kurloz when he tells you “no”, how you went over his nug, but he comes to you anyway and gives you him to lean on.  Little motherfucker is full solid. 

“Chapel,” you say, and sniff the air, listen hard.  You’re down low, by engines and nutritionblocks.  “…up three, midship.”

“Yeah.”  He pulls you closer, wraps himself up around your waist and presses up hard to your side.  “Let’s go.”

He talks on the way up, but it’s not really to you as you figure.  He just grumbles and growls to himself, little rough voice and humming thorax against your walk-struts, and you let yourself drift a little, let yourself think to keep off the tired fog in your thoughtsponge. You could sleep right now, easy.  Don’t want to.  Can’t let on at Karkat you feel so, or he’d try and make you again and then a motherfucker’d either turn him down cold or not go to chapel where Kurloz thought him to be.  Can’t abide at either of those, so you keep your head up and watch doors and steps and painted walls go by.

You’re almost up to chapel when it happens again.  You reach out, touch a wall and like the anger came when you were talking, the joy stabs up through you like a knife in the thorax, sudden great love and gratitude so strong you forget how to breathe.  It smites you where you stand a second, it burns in your thorax until you’re sure your pusher is about at being turned to ash. 

And then it fades, leaves you a little bit gray still on the insides.  A little bit dull and washed out.  Too much, too little.  Too much, too little.  You’re reminded sudden-like of a seadweller as came for you back at your wriggler hive, little bit before ascension.  He’d been small yet, half-grown, and you’d tussled with him real good, low on sopor and grit-tooth edgy for it.  One time he’d gotten on top, had pinned you in the surf and tried at drowning you as the waves came in.  This feels like and unlike—it washes up over you, cuts you off breathing, turns everything dull and loud and pounding in your head and sets your whole self on fire and then washes out and leaves you gasping and fighting and feeling air so cold on your sand-stung face as to burn. 

You’d ripped that wader’s head off.  Back when, you threw up after.  Now, you replay it for yourself.  Clear, like only the no-sopor nights could be.  Violet blood in the surf.  Violet foam washing over your feet.  Cold sand and grit under your feet all stained.

“…Gamzee?”

You went so deep down in your head, wandering through thoughts on thoughts on memories, takes you a second to remember your way back to yourself.  You twitch your fronds and then blink your ganderflaps and then manage to get at your squawk blister.

“Yeah?”

“We’re getting close.”

You look up and behold but you motherfucking are.  He’s stopped about as close to chapel as he’s allowed, and you feel a weary twinge of grateful sweetness that he knows as how he should act in holy places, that he doesn’t try to help you right up to the door.  And then “I can’t follow you in there,” he says, and the twinge gets washed over sudden and fierce with _anger._   For a second your pan is all roars and growling, _well why should you I’m no grub for you to lusus I’m not—_ you all but snap at him. 

He’s staring at your hands, your broken and bandaged-up wrist, your palms with their hundred tiny scars and healing scabs where your claws bit at your flesh when you were away and screaming.  He don’t notice you holding yourself back.  And away the anger goes, washing back out again.

“No,” you say instead.  “…not a place for you.”

“So…” he draws himself up, breathes in deep.  “…so you’re gonna have to keep your pan screwed on straight without any help.  Do you think you’re gonna be okay?”

No, you motherfucking don’t.  You don’t figure like you’ll ever be quite okay ever again.  But that’s not what query he’s making.  You shrug up a shoulder.

“We’ll just see, won’t we?”  _Best friend,_ you almost say, but the thought of the words tastes too sweet and false on your tongue.  You got none of that sweetness left.  It’s not in you any more.  At least not this second. 

Maybe he feels that distance in you, because he squeezes your fronds once and then lets them go real sharp and sudden.  Turns away from you.  “…I’ll go wait in your block I guess,” he says, and he might be just getting his hair straight when he reaches up to his face but you know it ain’t so.  Can hear the choke to the words, tiniest thread of tears.   “I missed you.  Dumbass.”

 _Missed you too,_ doesn’t come to chatterbox.  You stand there frozen mute and let him go, and then there you are, standing alone outside chapel, hearing the quiet murmur of voice and laugh and holy honk goin’ down inside.  Karkat gone, Kurloz gone, and you just standing all wrung out and alone in the empty hallway.

You gotta go in.  You got nowhere else you can go, and that’s the only reason as how you make yourself, how you get your feet walking.  You’re bare-feet already, so you got no shoes to take off—you just slip in quiet and sit in the back. 

You know for all your soft silence more than one set of eyes marks you there.  If nothing else then brother Uderak has probably staked you out.  You gotta talk to him about that, shit’s…a little bit motherfucking off.  Bit bothering and shit.  You appreciate the concern he has for you, know he’s worried, but he’s pushing hard for sure.

Kurloz is already up front, and he sees you too.  From how far you are and how blank he is you can’t make sign or glimpse of how he feels.  He bends down his head a little, and he might just be looking to his claws on the pulpit but you think you know him and you think he nods to you, _good you made it up to here after all_.

 _“If I go false on promised devotions let messiahs grind stardust out my bones,_ ” you say, to yourself more than anybody, letting some tiniest piece of comfort come from the words all familiar.  It’s a gift unlooked-for, that you know your verses still.  You keep your head down as more kin push in through the crowds and settle down by you, not looking at you any more than they’d look at any other, not knowing where you were or how you suffered.  You breathe in slow through your snuffnodes as you feel cool skin close to yours, and tap your claws on your leg as you keep going, let  the holy reaffirmation of faith slide out your thinkpan and through your fangs and keep your pan where you are. 

“ _—you flawed unholy troll, if you’d paint your face with the shades of our holy messiahs, answer_ yes brother I will—”  Somebody starts to lean to you real friendly, trying to make greeting—you keep your horns down and hands tapping and they get the meaning of how you don’t answer.  They lean back away again.  You breathe.  “ _If you believe truly in what holy mess and bloody riot will come at end of worlds, if you plan on bein’ full and motherfuckin’ ready, make some motherfuckin’ noise.._ ”

Somebody yells to a quadrant, real close by you and sudden—you all but snarl and then hold it back.  Look at your fronds, unchained and free, all the places you’re hurt bandaged up.

“ _Have your ticket ready when you kick it, give me an_ amen _brothers and sisters—_ ”

“Brother?”

It’s close by and sudden and you jerk up from your mumbling and see a sister you know.

“Brother Makara,” she says again.  Fuck, fuck fuck what’s her name?  You know her and know her to be faithful but _god_ you can’t remember her _fucking name_ and she’s reaching out at you.  “You look all manner of unwell.”

“Don’t touch me,” you say, and you get a calm to your chatterbox but you know there’s a whisper of chucklevoodoo under the words.  “Motherfucker get yourself back and _off me_ before I do some unrighteous motherfuckin’ work on you.”

Sister’s ears flick back, fins go down.  “…sorry, brother,” she says, and withdraws.  “Din’t mean no matter of fuckin’ harm, swear.  Fam got their concern on for you is all.”

You shiver off the killing rage that snaps at your insides, breathe deep and try to find some place more still.  When you breathe the air back out you let some of the snap and harsh go with it.

“…I get that, sister,” you say, and this time it’s you as reaches out, takes her arm and squeezes it a touch.  Doesn’t burn you none.  It’s fine.  You’re totally motherfuckin’ cool.  All manner of chill up in this motherfuckin’ rumpus.  “Do appreciate, I just…”

“Had a harsh time,” your sister finishes off for you.  “—can see it in you.  ‘S good, bro.  All good.  I’ll make patron prayer for you.  I got a saint, and he got torn up by brinies ‘n all, maybe that motherfucker’s got some comfort to give.  I’ll make patron prayer for you.”

“Yeah,” you say, and you smile but it feels cold and broke on your face. Mirth is lacking in you.  “Thanks.”

“No worries.”

She moves on down the row away from you to leave you some space for breathing in.  You sit quiet a minute after she goes, bow down your head and close your eyes, and you pray for a minute, silent and in need.  It’s a lifeline, a single thing to hold to.  You let it hold you a little more secure.  Then you raise up your head, open up your ganderflaps and keep the motherfuck on. 

You’re lookin’ down, but you know when Kurloz comes to pulpit by the silence that comes.  He’s been busy and gone and away for a long time, must have been.  He’s been lookin’ for you instead of preaching to his faithful for all you know how he loves to speak holy word on them.

Your oculars get a burn up in them.  You look down and run your hand over the bandaged mess of your broke wrist, and _you should be culled,_ your pan whispers at you again, and knowing it’s lying and both your best and sweetest mates think so does fuck-all to shut it up.  _You should be culled you shouldn’t have made it out._

“Good morning, blood of my blood,” says Kurloz, quiet and slow, and a riot answers back at him, yelling and honking and _good morning my lord_ and _welcome back biggest brother!_   He lets it carry on to its fade, then speaks on.  “—I’ve been well away from you all for too long and I’d make no apology for doing as I need to but I do got a good prick of remorse up in me and motherfuckin’ all.

“I’m here to talk real at my faithful on why that came to be.”

You sit up so sudden you feel hurt spike all up through you.  Mother _fucker,_ he can not be doing what you hear in his voice he’s doing.  The congregation can’t know as you know, but they quiet regardless.  They go soft-spoken and murmur to each other. 

“Through hundredfold sweeps past, there have been…sicknesses in the church,” Kurloz says.  Unease breaks to pure silence.  “…we know this true, won’t pretend we’re any shit but flawed trolls and messiahs forgive but we do fall.”

A few heads nod, but still the silence keeps on. They know something’s coming.  You sit frozen, stare down at your knees and don’t so much as breathe.  He can’t be leading up at what it sounds like, he _can’t_. 

“One sickness such has motherfuckin’ come through again,” Kurloz says.  “Something came up from the flesh and blood of your kin and they twisted it in ways unholy.”  A murmur all through the congregation.  Heads bowed, troubles whispers.  “They were burned from off the face of the universe.  Your kin’s faith and trial brought the church down on their heretic heads with fire and blood.”

Settling, thankful sounds.  Raised hands.  You look up, and Kurloz is looking at you.  Looking at you, picking you out from all the others around you.

“We have burned them from off the history of the church,” he says, and his eyes are sharp as knives before they turn finally away from you again, turn to your brothers and sisters around you.  “But I know our youngest yet hear of it, I am _motherfuckin’ aware_ that word passes down in whispers like _ghost stories_.  You consider on this, kin, you _think on this_ before you tell tales to our new-hatched and our fresh-ascended; what you tell as whispers to pass the day, you put in their pan to take root.  There is no _harmless_ passing on of poison like the kind we crushed.  There is no wriggler who’d resist asking, listening if they were told.  It’s on you.”

He looks around slow, like he could meet every eye.  You see older trolls, your hatching and sweeps above you, bow down your heads.  Remember the first time you heard the words hissed out in a quiet corner, _haven’t you ever heard of the Cult of Flesh?_

“If our littlest brothers and sisters hear of ancient sins,” Kurloz says, “—who’d turn their back on a lure like that?  And as you pointed them to it you’d stain up your soul.  You all know how forgiveness shrinks from faithful who seek out the false scriptures that have _brought others to blasphemous damnation_.”

For a second, the air is cold to breathe.  The force of his voice makes your soul shudder fearful.

Kurloz bows his head.

“We cannot tolerate the creeping blasphemy that would poison your souls at the speculation of it,” he says, and his eyes turn up.  “You here on the _Dark Carnival_ and all you watching from beyond, do not risk your faith and your life to speak on it.  Don’t let it take you like it took the kin who died damned yesterday.”

You bow down your head and the kin beside you lean in and lay hands on you as tears burn at your eyes.

“ _You okay, brother?_ ”

You can’t answer.  Nod and make a tiny, trembling noise that’s supposed to be a _yeah, m ‘m cool I‘m okay_ but it’s just a sob.  Hands rub at your back, not like a palemate but like family.  Pat your shoulders and don’t shoosh but murmur at you _hey now brother, kin be easy now, come on…_

“There are kin out there on every ship of this fleet who are looking for the messiahs,” says Kurloz above and far away, “Make support and shore up for your best motherfuckers.  Look to your kin who slip on the road.  Let them die if die they must but if they’ll live make their lives to be a testament.  Don’t you let your kin be less than what they can!  Hear me?!”

Voices cry out and hands rise. 

You don’t hardly hear the rest of the sermon.  There’s something more on convictions, more on the support of the church, the bond of purple blood but fuck if you hear or make sense.  A brother’s head is all fully up and far off in the stars.

They leave around you after the service, and you can spare the time for feeling kinda bad you weren’t there to hear.  Kurloz preaches so good and sweet, and it’s a blessing to hear him, but here you are makin’ him and Karkat all worry and fearful.  Not even hearing him speak. 

It’s thoughts like that, keep your eyes off him as you finally get up and start at the door.  How are you gonna look at him when you ignore his true words at you?  You dragged yourself up here, yeah, but your thoughts weren’t on messiahs or prayers or even the sermon preached at you.  How’d a motherfucker even pass the time?  Your thinkpan was all full of nothing, like it always motherfuckin’ is.

You pick yourself up as the last couple faithful file out, stand and smile for the messiahs more because your body remembers than because your thinkpan does.  Feels fake on your face, but the effort is motherfucking made and that’s all as you can get through just now.  Smile for the messiahs, supplicate, horns up and head back, throat bare, then turn to the door and make like to go.

You were so much distracted you didn’t even motherfucking see as Kurloz walked up.  You turn and find him watching you, leaning on pew’s end, within frond’s reach of you and looking at you real even.  You take such a motherfucking startle off that you yell and jump away from him, half-fall back on your seat and stare, and he twitches a grin and then gives up and laughs at you, reaching out a hand for you to pull yourself up on. 

“Well _fuck me sideways_ ,” he says, and he’s still got that edge of power to his voice from preaching, soft and rising to loud again.  “Look at the wriggler jump.”

“Not motherfuckin’ cool,” you say, but you know it’s funny.  Can’t quite laugh, but you put on a smile.  Let him pull you up.  Standing up so fast kinda sets your pan spinning, and the spinning sets your posture column tight—you can’t pass out, that would be worse than sleeping even. 

“I gotta sit down,” you say.

“Oh yeah?”  he cocks up a brow at you, a stretch to the smudged eye-hollow of his death’s head mask.  “…’zat so.  I got plenty a spot for a little motherfucker like you to fit your ass in, up in my block.”

He don’t start moving, though.  Stays where he stands, waiting on you, letting you pick.  You can’t find the place to love him yet, in your banged-up pusher, but you’re sore motherfucking grateful for him.  He gives the choice back at you, and what you want…

What you find you want…

“I’ll find myself a place,” you say, and you pull yourself away.

You see the blank in him—whatever he feels when you pull back, he don’t want you to see, and if he’s working hard enough as to hide even the littlest flicker from you, he must be hiding motherfucking hard indeed.  But he nods like he gets it, and looks you deep in the eyes for a second or two before he looks away and lets you go.  For just a second as he stands straight and turns away, you linger on the _size_ of him, the age, the ancient curve of his horns.  The starburn that’s pressed hints of a crease into the edge of his smile and the corner of his ganderflaps.  He’s wearing the trollhorn hoops in his ears and his royal death’s head paint and his shoulders bear broad and you feel so small.  So fucking small.

“… _You come find me whenever you want,_ ” he tells you, and the moment passes a little.  Leaves you shaken and breathless and small still, with the empty gullet of the long dark behind you.  But comforted, to have him there.  You breathe again.  “I’ll be around.  But I think you want loneliness just now, more than kin.”

You have to swallow once, twice before words will come out.  “… _think that’s so,_ ” you say, because sureness doesn’t come easy any more.  You’re…shaken.  You can feel it like a crack in your mask, like a wound. 

“Say a prayer for me,” he says, and he kisses your head between your horns as gentle as any fucker ever touched, and he leaves you to look out at the stars.


	29. Panbent, Fleshbound, Hornstuck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp, I totally meant to post this at the same time as the previous one, and then I fell asleep on my keyboard. So I guess I'm posting it at 3 AM instead.

You stay there watching the dark for a long time.  It’s not a busy place, the spot you picked to sit and stay, and even when you get your know on by the sound of far-off footsteps and chatterboxes makin’ holy riot that it’s starting towards sundown you don’t really make to move.  One or two times you hear feet go past behind you—a single troll sitting quiet to watch the dark go past is nothing.  Life goes on busy and noisy.  Mean, messy and rowdy.  You sit and watch the stars, and try to count. 

You get bored tryin’, after a while—numbers being tricky little fucks as they are and you having no place in them but for keeping track of scripture—and you start looking for the shapes instead, making names.  That could be the shape of Jakill’s sign, and all in halves a little, too far apart being as how he got tore in half.  You know a couple real hard-horned motherfuckers who pray to him special, for going on when you figure you can’t, when your body’s bleeding and ruined and you still got throats to tear and horns to crush.  All his peace and gentle went in the one part to die and he kept on fighting all ripped apart until he’d killed every motherfucker there.  Then he fell down and died.  You trace a claw idle on your leg, making his sign.  Saint of the Destroyers. The ones who die standing up and bloody to the bone. 

You find others too, with less care as time passes—Mortor the Defender who’d be burned alive before he’d turn over family to lowbloods.  All lookin’ out from the carnival for folk who’d die for the real shit, the important shit.  Saint Trasti who prayed as she died and brought up a plague from her ashes to wipe out the fuckers that did her in.  You’d bet Untoxxic prays to her.   Saint Ekorot for the ones who die in cocoons.

You know Kurloz made prayer to her, when you were long-gone and growing.  You know you did for Karkat too.  You wonder sometimes if she minds as how most folk don’t remember her till they’re scared for a quadrant or a hatefriend and then every motherfucker on the fleet’s making prayer at her.  You’d figure that’s just a bit of a motherfucking annoyment.  Maybe you should send her a prayer more regular-like night to night.

Not as patron though.  You didn’t ever find a saint as gave you that feeling like they’d walk with you, like you were theirs.  You don’t ever feel like a destroyer, a defender, you just do as best like you can, and you hurt.  But there’s no Saint Sufferer up in the stars for you to take as yours.  None you’ve heard on, anyway.  You’d send prayer to a Sufferer for sure.

“Gamzee?”

You count it victory you don’t snap.  Jump and grab for a club you don’t got, but you don’t challenge or show fangs, and when you turn you’re glad of that.  You don’t want to growl at Karkat. 

“Hey best friend,” you say, melancholy, and he comes up and sits down by you.  He’s wearing his uniform, shoving away his palmhusk back into his sylladex as he sits, and you figure as how you can pretty well make the call he was just talkin’ about you to the empress.  He said he was to wait on you in your block—maybe she asked him to look in at you and check you didn’t throw yourself out in space.  “I’m thinkin’ about the saints.”

“Oh,” he says.  Just ‘oh’.  Looks out at the stars with you. The both of you sit and look for a bit.  Let the big black empty out in front of you eat up everything a motherfucker could’ve thought to be saying.

“…what about the saints?”  he asks, finally.  Still real quiet, like he don’t want to disturb you.  You were zoned out, not thinking of saints anymore—not thinking of any fucking thing—you blink and come back to with a little jump. 

“Uh…” it’s hard to get your thinkpan all sorted up.  For just a sec, you think to blame the sopor—but there hasn’t been no more slime, not for sweeps.  Messiahs but you must be getting fuzzy in the pan, to forget that one.  “Huh.”

“Gamzee?”

“Mm?”

“What were you thinking about?”

Right, he did all get his wicked curiosity on of that.  Right.  “I was…just puttin’ stars to them,” you say, and point a hand.  “Those ones…no, hold up.  Think I lost ‘em.  They were…” you wave a hand from star to star, looking for the mark of the Defender again.  Slowly your hand falls back down, too heavy to hold up, and you just stare out at the stars.

“… _Gamzee_.”

Karkat is looking at you, hard in the face but soft in the eyes.  Pale. 

“You need to sleep.”

_Sleep, messiah-bringer, sleep easy…_

You shake your head so fast and sharp your horns ache.  “No.”  He’s getting up, reaching out to pull you up—“— _no,_ best friend.”

“ _Coon,_ Gamzee, come on…”

“Don’t you MOTHERFUCKING order me!”

He pulls his hands back sharp and stares at you.  You’d be staring to your own self if you could, goddamn—but there’s this deepest well in you, heavy pit and black hollow empty that spits out rage.  Reminds you how the sea would be back at your hive, so long ago.  You’d see pitch dark out the window as it thundered to shake the ground, and then lightning would cut the dark in half and you’d see waves tossed up to the sky, black like ink with white burning on the tossed peaks of them.  That’s how it feels, these black waves up in your soul, and the rage lights them up to you for seconds at a time.  You were hurt, and from the wounds left on your soul you spit back _hate._  

“…I wasn’t giving you orders,” Karkat says finally, careful-slow, and the moment breaks.  You crumple up on yourself, because of course he wasn’t.  Of fucking _course_ he wasn’t and if he was he didn’t mean it so harsh and like you owed him obedience.  He wouldn’t ever.  He don’t own you and knows not to act like he does, fuck, you’re such an idiot...  “—Gamzee, whatever you’re thinking right now, stop.”

You blink and stop and straighten up to see him again.  You feel bowed down.  Made less. 

“Good,” he says.  “…thanks for telling me.  I mean, I don’t like getting yelled at, but…” and then when he sees the awful ache of guilt boil up in you, “—but I’d rather get yelled at now because I’m doing something you don’t like than put my foot down my protein chute later and make you flip out!  Okay?  Shoosh.  Communication is _good_.  That’s good.  Good…good job.”

You feel reassured and at the same moment feel that rage try to snap up into you _I don’t need you to tell me_ good boy good job _like your barkbeast_ —

He’s watching you.

“…hey,” he says, and it’s gentle, too gentle, for his familiar shouting voice.  He sounds soft.  Your acid sac hurts.  “…you know I’m not here to hurt you, right?”

You do.  You do know, of course you know that.  But…

“…everything,” you say, and stop and breathe.  “…everything.  Hurts.”

His eyes are all soft, opened up on the inside like he never gets but with you.  “That’s what I’m trying to fix,” he tells you, and reaches out to you again, and this time you keep yourself from snapping.  “But I—I don’t know how, Gamzee, fuck.  I can _see_ half of the things I do setting off another terrestrially-entrenched explosive device like I’m trying to sprint across a whole fucking field of them and they’re all in your thinkpan.  But.  I’m going to keep fucking trying.  I’m not gonna stop.  So…just keep talking to me, and we’ll be a-o-fucking-kay.”

“…we’ll be okay,” you say again after him, and try to relax into those words.  The sick feeling of your acid sac churning doesn’t ease.  Peace won’t settle to you.  “Fuck.”

He shifts around with his fronds all knotted up in front of him, watches you from under low flaps as you try to figure how you ever felt less than  stuck in your own thinkpan and fucked-up body, twitching at sounds not there and sights imagined.  Panbent and fleshbound and hornstuck. 

Karkat watches you. 

“…do you…want to talk about it?”

Do you?  You don’t really got your know on of that, if you’re totally motherfuckin’ honest with yourself.  You stand because you can’t sit any more, pace to the window and back.  Moving makes no help to your scattered pan.

“Dunno,” you say. 

“Will you try?  Fuck, I mean, can you try, for me?”  And then, forcing out the word like he’s not used to the noise of it, “…please?”

Your love for him sets you staggering—for real, staggering, back off your feet and sitting down hard as how you love him burns through you and wipes you away from your own thinkpan, whites you out inside.  Karkat is saying words at you, worried at you, but you can’t see or think or hear him until something snaps back closed in you and the love fades back down like the joy did, like the rage does. 

“Gamzee what the _fuck_?  What the fuck—you shit-guzzling chute-stuffer why the fuck didn’t you tell me you still—”

“…’s okay,” you get out, bleary over top of him.  “I’m okay, ‘m good.”

“What happened?”

How do you even put words round it?

“Just got all to thinkin’ fond on you,” you say, “—and it took me right the motherfuck away.”

“Oh…?”  you can tell he don’t get it still—that’s cool, you don’t much motherfuckin’ get it either.  “Do you…but you feel better now?”

“Guess you could all be callin’ it that,” you allow, just a touch not sure.  “…if a brother was looking real sideways at this bitch, could call it ‘better’.”

“At this point, I’m willing to fucking take that,” he says, and takes your hand.  Winds his hot fingers up in yours real romantic.  “Listen, let’s just go back to your block, okay?  I’m not…okay, I know they’re your family and all, but they’re not exactly throwing themselves gratefully at my glorious fronds.  Can we talk…y’know.  Alone?”

The thought of getting up again is a great motherfucking hardship to you.  But he looks on you with sad eyes and you can’t ever bear Karkat to be sad like that.  And you can’t care enough to put up a fight and stay, either, so you let him pull you up and lead you back, down hallways you know so well but feel so far off from.

Nobody’s been in your block since last you left it.  You can tell—sopor’s gone patchy on top, mess just the way it was, and the air smells still and stale.  Karkat sets you down on your chair and goes bouncing off around, pressing buttons on your access panel and shoving away piles of stuff and making clean what’s fucked up.  Turns on the aeration channels so the air gets stirred round and replaced fresh.  And then he comes back to you.  Stands and looks you up and then down again and nods to himself like he’s made count and you’re all there.

“…Okay.  I’m just gonna say what I’m thinking, okay?”  Karkat crosses his fronds in front of him, solid little motherfucker like he is.  “And then when I’m done you can tell me if I’m right or wrong.”

Sounds good.  You sit and you wait.

“I used to be able to tell what was going on in that fucked-up shambles you use as a thinkpan,” Karkat says, and tilts his head a little on one side to look at you, like you’re something he don’t quite get.  “—but now…you’re just blank all the time, until you snap at me or start crying or laughing or whatever.  So I guess you’re probably still not feeling stuff at 100%, right?”

Are you supposed to answer that?  He’s sitting waiting, so you’d guess you are.  You think it over, and that motherfucker does have the sense of a truth in it, so you nod. 

“Okay.”  Karkat breathes out deep through his nose.  “…you’re obviously scared of going to sleep.  So I think you’re probably scared of me, too, because…because I try to calm you down and make you relax, and of course that’s a huge fucking NO right now.”  He stops, knocks a heel on the floor once or twice.  “…besides, we’re both in the habit of finishing off with somebody subbing the other one out and you just had a whole fucking shitload of slimy consent issues dumped on you by certain douchebags too disgusting to give a fucking name.”

He don’t make you answer that, with you are full motherfuckin’ grateful for.  Just carries on.

“So, I think that maybe—just maybe, and this is a best guess, okay—maybe it would be easier for you to jam if you…if I…was the one going under.”

You’ve done it before—all the time, you’ve hazed him out a hundred times, but the thought still takes you as a sudden shock.  Never occurred, never took up notice in your thinkpan, that he might not come to you with you so torn up and demand at trying to fix you.

“…Gamzee?”

You’re staring at him.  Right, fuck, right.

“Sounds…” how do you put to words, how it sounds?  That’s a real puzzle of a motherfuckin’ thing, right there.  “…good.”  Not enough, but you’re chill with that.  It’ll have to work, because that’s all as how you can describe right now.  “But—“ you hold up your fronds in the space between the two of you—you’re all shake and tremble, worse the longer you hold your fronds against the pull of their weight.  “Don’t know how good a brother can do this right now.”

“Mm.”  Karkat wraps up your frond in both of his.  He can’t cover your whole hand with his, has to wrap your fingers up and then your palms, but the warm is nice.  “Okay, I’ll admit you’ve got a point about that one, your claws are fucking ridiculous and I’m horns over heels for you for some stupid godforsaken reason but that doesn’t mean I want my visage-caster lacerated.”

It’s a joke, but the way he makes eyes at you when he says “horns over heels for you” makes your pump biscuit flutter a little bit and it’s still kinda numb but it’s…better.  Just for that littlest sliver’s-worth it’s better.

“…touch…”

The words choke off in you.  You come over ten other motherfucking shades of shy all sudden, like a wriggler in his first pile, it spikes up through you and washes past and for a second you can’t hardly breathe of it.

“…Gamzee?”  Karkat is fussing at you, brows drawn down low and all gnashing his pointy little fangs.  “Gamzee, ‘touch’ what?  You?  I thought—”

The idea of him laying hands on your horns and trying to soothe snaps you off your blushes and throws you horns-first at fear instead.  “No!”  you say, hoarse and half-shout.  Karkat backs off away from you, and you see the way his fronds twitch, smell the briefest electric smell as he reaches for his sickle and then makes himself to not. 

“You,” you say, trying to make explanation at his worried face, his tensed-up shoulders.  “You, touch—you.  You touch your own self.  For me.”

Makes him go red—hell, makes you go purple, for that’s worth.  It’s not a thing you’ve often done.  Night to night you just touch at each other, no need for papping yourself except for if the two of you were far apart.  And you don’t think it’s ever been him doing it.  Normal-like he tells you what you should do and you do it for him, not the other way around. 

“…okay,” he says.  “What the fuck, let’s make this happen.”

You get all moving around until you find places to get your settle down.  He sits himself on your chair, you get curled on the pile to look at him. 

He already smells like he wants you, and that’s the first thing you notice on to speak of.  

“You want so much already?”  It would be a tease at him, but you can’t find it in you to make it so.  Just tired.  Curious.  Mighty motherfuckin’ pink does he go, anyway.  “I can smell you from here.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, all sharp.  “Yeah.  Yeah, well, fuck you.”

“Shhh,” you tell him, and he blinks and then blows out a breath.  “Don’t get yourself all harshed up at me now, bro.”

“I’m not,” he snaps at you again, and you feel an answer of anger bite through you, pounding all sharp in your gills and behind your auricular clots. 

“ _Watch your mouth_ , motherfucker.”

You look at each other quiet a second, both of you startled y all as what you just said and heard.

“…fuck,” says Karkat.  He sits forward and puts his head in his hand, digs his fingers in through his hair.  “Fuck, maybe—maybe this wasn’t a good idea.  This was dumb, I’m fucking sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“Sit down.”

He stops.  You don’t want him to go, he _can’t_ , you’re worthless troll-flesh and you can’t bear for him to go and you _need_ him, so you put all the power you got behind his voice and you say again.

“Sit _down,_ Karkat.”

He sits.  He drops his hands. 

“I know why you went and did,” you say, and you didn’t before now but when you think about it you do.  When you put real motherfucking thought to it, it’s clear to your pan.  “You been without me too long.  Forgot how it was to get conciliated like you need.  Aint’ that so?”

“Wh-what—“ it’s a startlement to him, you putting him so in his place, you can motherfuckin’ tell.  Your best brother wasn’t prepared for you to put shit to him he’d know to be true.  Wasn’t all up and _prepared_ for this motherfucker and the truths you had to drop.  Didn’t expect.

“You’ll touch your horns when I talk to you,” you say, and put all the control you didn’t have into the words you say at him.  They did what they wanted with you, they didn’t ever listen to what you said, but he does.  He will.  You sit forward toward him.  “ _Do like I tell you_.”

And he does.  You don’t have to beg and plead and make obeisance to him, he does as you say for him to like what you say has a weight, and you feel a thrill off it like sopor didn’t ever gave you.

“You got scared,” you say, testing it out, seeing if you know right, and he makes a little noise and fights himself a second and then he nods.  “Well that makes a set of us there, best friend, for fuckin’ sure.”

“I know,” he says, and it’s all small and pain, his eyes are so red.   His fronds go tensed, his claws dig at his horns.  “I know, you—fuck, I knew you were scared, and I couldn’t get to you, I just—”

“Shhh, shoosh.”  Holy fuck you put your foot right in that motherfucker and no mistake.  You back off that a little bit, hold your hands up even though they shake.  “Shoosh, motherfucker.”

“Right.”  He blinks too fast, shakes his head, gentles up on his horns.  “Yeah, fuck, okay.  Right.”

“Go more gentle at yourself,” you push, and he nods and takes himself a breath.  Another one.  “Okay.  Uh…you keep one of ‘em right there, dig, I want to…” but your hands are shaking and you can’t, so you gotta fix it, “—I want you to get the other one up in your business.  Get casual with your motherfuckin’ fins.”

He puffs up shocked and all red.  “They’re not,” he starts, and that red-cheeked open-broken way he looks at you isn’t doing a motherfucking thing for the way you want to touch him, for how bad you want to put fronds on him and can’t.  It wavers in and out still, too strong and gone, too strong and gone, but it’s there.  It’s coming back towards middle. 

“Don’t matter,” you tell him, “A brother can’t even be taking charge on this right now.  No threshecutioners here, best beloved.  Just you and me and you’ll do as what I’m like to tell you.  Won’t you?”

“… _oh_ ,” he says, and you thrill inside, seeing him fall apart for you.  _You’re_ the one in power now, you’re the one who tells and orders, and you’re doing right by him as you order.  No phony fake-ass kindnesses or _brother we know best for you._

You blink back at a soft little chirr, at the smell of pale and wanting, and you see he’s taken to your order real nice.  One hand on the sweet little palmful of a horn, one stroking at a soft little red little fin.  He’s breathing all slower now, watching you watch him, red in the cheeks.  His rattlebox chirrs on every couple breaths, soft and low and sweet. 

“… _you gonna come over and keep me company or what, fuckfronds?_ ” he mumbles, all bleary and small, and then yawns.  You could tear at him from throat to guts.  You don’t.  You don’t.  You won’t.    You edge up closer, try to rule yourself through fear of him—the fear of what he could do to you, that fatal, sleeping power he has over you that could drag you down and make you broken open for him.  He’d do it without any meaning to hurt, he’d do it to _help_ , and they did it to help, and you can’t handle that shit right now. 

And maybe he gets that, ‘cause he keeps his hands to himself, on himself.  Keeps them away from you, just touches a hot cheek and watches you as you come up closer. 

And then another rush of the hot and sweet hits you like a lightning-strike and you dive for him.  You topple him back over and for all a brothers’ words about letting you take him under he reciprocates good and motherfucking hard, arches himself up to press his thorax to yours so you can feel his purr and clings to you and nuzzles his face up into your neck.  He smells like pale want.  He smells like tears.

“ _I don’t care about your claws,_ ” he tells you, and you wanna talk back, tell him that’s a thing as probably should concern a motherfucker, but he turns your head down and slides the pitiful little curves of his horns against yours, _click-click-click_.  “ _Whatever you need, I don’t care—_ ” he catches his breath on a gasp, and there’s a desperate fire all burning up in his eyes.  It scares you, almost, he looks at you like he wants to hollow himself out and give everything inside to you, like he’d crack himself open and hand you his pump biscuit if you said the word.  “— _I don’t care if you hurt me—_ ”

“I’m not gonna fucking _hurt you_ ,” you say, and he chews on his lip and starts to open up his mouth like he’s about to argue.  “Best friend, if you figure how they used me’s set me so far wrong in the thinkpan as I’d…” you imagine for just a skinned second his voice cracking tearful, _stop please stop_ and the way that takes you is enough to make you sick.  You couldn’t ever hurt him like you meant it, you couldn’t ever even _think_ at it.

“…Gamzee?”

“Just because they fucked me up,” you say, and there’s anger behind the words, and hurt and mother _fucker_ but you’re pale for him.  “You figure I wanna fuck you up too?  Best and brightest _dumbass_ little moon of my daytime, you think their scars are gonna fade by me putting new ones on you?  That’s the _dumbest fucking thing_ I ever heard and you’re no motherfucking _martyr_ for me!  Okay?!”  Cracks coming out your mouth, just breaks down the middle.  “They didn’t break me!”

“I—I know, I know they didn’t—“

“I wouldn’t ever hurt you, you— _you,_ you…motherfucking _panleak_ , I’d flay myself open and crush my pusher in m-my own fronds for want of keeping you safe, I’d—” You take a breath so deep and shaking it stretches your thorax, then another one, and Karkat is staring at you like a new diamond, scared and eyes wide and fronds half-raised to reach for you.  His face is painful-pale, and your voice won’t stay steady where you put it, shaking all over the motherfucking place.  “I’m not ruined so I’d hurt you they couldn’t fuck that up n-no matter how bad they—”

“I know.”  He comes forward, gets on his knees in your lap and you cling onto him as he squeezes you, shooshes you, touching you like he’s scared frantic, like he can’t remember how.  “I know!  I know, I know, shoooosh, I’m sorry—that was phenomenally dumb of me, I’m sorry—”

He trails off to soft little murmurs, wordless things and small.  You can’t touch him with clawtips, but your palms are flat and don’t hold threat and you let them have their run of him, all up and down his skin, over soft places and hard, chitin plates and fragile skin.  Pet his thorax and his shoulders and his thighs and his hair all tufty-soft to your fronds.  Let him feel you feel him, see him keep his eyes nailed on you the whole time.  He throws his limbs out wide for you.  He makes his soft places yours. 

You twitch once, twice, three times as you touch him, feel hate bubble up in you and know he sees how you jerk and jump and hiss.  He keeps himself open.  He bares his neck to your fangs, and makes them blunt.  He tames you to him.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he tells you, bleary and all slurred-up with purring, and takes your hand and presses it down in the middle of his thorax, the place where pale lives.  “We’re gonna take this mess you got thrown into and we’re gonna fuck it right up the excretion chute.”

Messiahs help you, but you almost believe him.

\--

Karkat answers the door to Gamzee’s block when you knock, but you can tell by how he looks and how he smells and the whole and entire seeming of him that Gamzee’s in there with him.  He softens up a little bit to see you, glances back and then closes the portal behind him and crosses his arms, daring at you to say a word about his finger-combed hair and the flush of his pretty little mutant fins. 

“Final census from the cult,” you say, and drop a palmhusk for him, all loaded up with files.  He catches it barely, and flips through it frowning.  “You got stomach for interrogation, freakblood?”

“Threshecutioners are a capture and recovery unit,” says Karkat, and the flush of his fins makes its way to something a touch more pale-ish.  Gray and bloodless.  “We don’t interrogate.”

“Uh-huh.”  Well, more pain for you.  You’ll appraise him of what you need to get done night by night, and he’ll go pale enough from summary, if you guess right.  “Well, speaking on that, I’m tasking at you today you gotta get your goddamn lowbloods off my motherfuckin’ boat.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” says Karkat, all kinda motherfuckin’ weary.  “It’s not like your doctorturers are going to help us any, and our medic never came back from leave.  They were somewhere on the Condescension, and then they just…vanished.  So we’re gonna need a new medic, that’s fucking spectacular.  Only took me all of two or three straight sweeps to get one I like, goddammit.”

“I’m tryin’ _real_ hard to get my care on of that,” you say, bored in every syllable, and Karkat hisses and rolls bulb at you.  “Get ‘em back on dirty ground, that’s all I’m sayin’.  Lucky enough you motherfuckin’ are my faithful have tolerated them so long.”

“Oh yeah,” Karkat says, and there’s a note all bitter to his voice, and his eyes flick back over his shoulder at the door behind him.  “I’m _so_ fucking lucky.”

There’s a silent second after that, a second where the both of you think on the quadrant you share and both of you feel things more tender than harsh. 

“…how’s he bearing it?”

“Oh, y’know.”  Karkat rakes his fronds back through his short-cut hair and his gaze don’t quite make acquaintance of yours.  “…great.  Just absolutely fine.  He still won’t go to sleep, I think he’s having nightmares still, that shit they forced him to drink is still giving him hallucinations…”

And you hate yourself for the asking of it, but you gotta make question, “Could he dream up for us—”

“He can’t use them on purpose!” says Karkat real sharp.  “They’re not his powers, he always had his…his fear, his dreams, never—whatever that was.”

“They forced it on him,” you say, and it’s a growl at the thought, long and low and rolling out from the fury in your guts.  “Almost fucking _killed_ him.”

“Focus,” he snaps at you, and the affront takes place of fury.  Clears your head a little.  “Get a hold of yourself, fuck.  So…the drugs, we know what those do, but I mean…I just don’t know if the blood really did anything.  Is that even a thing?  Could—?”

“The mutant boy?”  Curls your lip, but you hate yourself to know it’s the feeding of that blood to your beloved that disgusts you, not the memory of that earnest, bloody face.  Those soft silver hands reaching for you.  Never disgust for him.  Hate, want, pain for him.  Longing, bloodlust, sweet sinful regret for him. 

Karkat is staring at you.

“…no way of knowing,” you say, late and too quiet.

“Hey.”

You stare at him.  For a second, his eyes are earnest, red, his face soft and young.  A motherfuckin’ child preacher.

Then he bares his teeth in a grin, and he’s your kismesis again.  Dark-skinned, grown and scarred, hateful and hate-beloved.  His eyes are burning with intent.

“Where’s your edge tonight, you fucking relic?”

Oh, the little motherfucker means to _aggress._   Well ain’t _that_ a treat. 

…a treat you can’t find it in yourself to indulge.  You’re alone, so you lean down far enough like as to kiss him and then smack his plushy little rump to make the dumb little fucker squeak.  Then you straighten back up again.

“Call me ‘relic’ again as you motherfuckin’ will,” you say, and grin as he strains up a little toward you, wanting more than you gave him but too hilariously far down to the ground to reach for it.  “But it’s too long a night and too late a day for me to wreck your ass right now, little globesy motherfucker as you are.  Besides, you got report to make to the Empress.”

It’s a guess, but it’s a guess with a pan behind it and you know by the way he drops his head back and groans you hit that one right on the money.  Unlucky little fucker. 

Well if he’s gonna do all the reporting and papers for the day, you’re gonna leave ‘em for him and head to ‘coon.  You’re getting a pan-ache anyway, thinking back on concerns out from back off the home planet.  Thinking about _him,_ him who you could’ve been but aren’t, could never be now.  Thinking about daymares and sopor and…

…Maybe you’ll lie in the light  a while.  Could do you good for the pain in your thinkpan.

You drop yourself down on your platform and click on the fake sun at just past midnight.  At an hour past, you find yourself laid out flicking through scriptures on your palmhusk. 

At two hours past, you call the empress.

“What are you doin’ up?” is what first she says at you.

“Unsettled of thinkpan,” you disclose at her, and you know she knows you’re meaning at daymares by the way she huffs. 

“Stop bein’ a li’l bitch,” she says.

“The fuck I am!”

“The fuck you shore as glub is!  I give two whole fucks aboat this shoal mess, that’s wave more than I give about most stuff, but _buoy_.”  She finishes paintin’ up her lips and clicks her visage-decoration unit shut again.  “Boi.”

“This ain’t some small thing, Meenah,” you snap.  “My blood and my kin suffer out of this motherfucker!”

“Whatchu want me to do?”  She cuts you off with the click of her fangs, the dart of her dark eyes.  “What do you _eely_ want?  You din’t just call me to whine, anglerfish.  What, you want me to fix it?  Make it all better?”

You didn’t know what you wanted, when you called.  You didn’t know, just that you had to distract and direct from the storm getting its howl on deep down in your pan.  But those words bring a shame of a wiggler chirr to your throatstem and you sit confounded at it because…

“…oh,” she says, and she must see by your look and hear by your silence what the answer is.  “I sea.”

“I can take care of my own self,” you say, too little and too late.

“Yeah, right,” she says.  “Ask me.”

“Ask for what.”

She looks at you, and you know what she wants and you know you’re going to obey.

“Ask,” she says again.  “ _Polite,_ Kurlz.”

“…your Condescension,” you say, all courtly graces, and you overplay it because you can’t stand at having her know how truly you mean every word.  “If you’d see your way clear at conciliating me till I can’t fuckin’ see straight, I’d be g-ray-tful to the ends of the motherfuckin’ empire and back.”

“Mm.”  She regards long and quiet, and then sits herself back and nods.  “Fine.  Getchyourshellf striptided off.  No shirt, no shoes no mothaglubbin’ surf-vice.”

It’s a big step to make as the first, and you weren’t expecting.  For a second you hold still, hesitate to follow orders—she looks at you cold and hard and tyrian-old, and you crumble just a touch under that.  Like you’re young again.  You strip down.

“Good.  Put your claws on your throat,” she says, an order and no wavering from it.  You catch a softest little moan in your throat, and follow as you’re told. “You’d make yourshellf bleed if I atolld you to, wouldn’ya?”

For that thoughtless rulership in her voice, for the way she takes all your sweeps and makes you a fumbling wriggler again, messiahs but you would.  You would draw your blood for her, you would choke yourself to darkness and back and draw blood off the old and still-tender slits of your gills.

“I’m,” you make to start, and she hisses at you low and fierce.

“Don’t you glubbin’ move!  You’ll do like you’re _told_ , shrimp.”

“…you ain’t here to make me,” you argue, but you know she knows she’s the winner of you.  She’s got you in her claws.

“I’m waverywhere,” she says.  “You in my empire.  You’s _mine._ ”

The spark of pitch flares in you, but the diamond snuffs it out in thoughtless obeisance. This was being as what you _needed,_ you didn’t know but fuck if it ain’t.  You were looking for this shit, and she makes the choices now and none of that is on your stupid fuckin’ thinkpan.   You don’t have to decide a single goddamn thing.  You ain’t your own.

“Paint off,” she says.  “Now.”

Even for her, even as she owns you right now, those words send a jolt through you.  You’re not—you can’t just—

“Kurloz,” she says.  “Now.”

\--

She has you speak on your daymares bare-faced, and by the time she’s done with you, you can’t hardly get words to be happening.  You force out noises, and she tells you how you feel and how you should touch yourself and what face you should show at her.  Not to tears, she can’t push you so far even when you’re this far gone, but closer than you’d imagine.   Leaves you lying out under the sun, eyes all but closed and thorax humming.  She leaves nothing up to you, and for a glorious hour, maybe two, you’re gone and light and hurting and free. 

You come back down slow, to responsibility and pan-ache and pusher-throb, feeling aches take back up hive in you.  Feeing how you breathe like you’ve gotta lift a weight to do it.  Still you don’t sleep, but you feel heavy like you could, now.  If there was just one more thing you had, one more thing…the air is so thick in your snuff-nodes with scent of pale complacence you don’t hardly notice the adding-on of more until you hear the soft brush of fronds on the ground and realize there’s just that slightest sniff of difference to the smell. 

Gamzee settles down by you, real slow, lays inches from you.  Not touching but close enough as you could reach out for him.  He has his back to you.  Doesn’t say a word to you or look back.  It’s the first time he’s come to seek out company, and you don’t dare move for a long minute in case you scare him off. 

“… _I don’t wanna sleep_ ,” he says to you.  You don’t answer, but he don’t look to you for one.  He lays his head down.  He closes his eyes, his tired, shadowed-out eyes, and curls up by you in the light.

He drifts away for a while.  You catch him all amove and twitchy-growling in his sleep and take hand to his horns real gentle, pet his hair with true and flush until he settles.  His face is thin and worn and the paint is fresh around his eyes and mouth, barely even cracked.  He’s yet as large as he has been, but so frail he has not seemed to you in a mighty motherfucking span of sweeps.  Like a painting drained out of color, he seems sapped of some part deep and vital.

You love him fierce.  Love him with killing fondness.  With a shattering sweetness that makes you whole by breaking into and through you.  You’d crush up stars with your bare fronds and light up his worn-out soul with them if you could. 

You don’t make sound on purpose, but your low and wanting chirr turns in your throat to a soft hum.  A tune a hundred sweeps or more from its making; not the raucous and fresh-spawned hymns, but an old tune you learned so long ago you can’t hardly recall where.  A song more thorax than throatstem, more rattle-chatter-chitter-chirr than singing.  You can smell him, really smell him for the first time in so long, and he reeks pale and soothed, finally calmed for the moment.  Pain and fear smoothed over.

He moves when you stroke his hair back with just a single claw, careful not to scrape at his paint.  Opens his eyes, winces down a little from the false sunlight that spills down on you, and then looks at you and smiles.

That smile breaks your cautious self, crushes down your defenses and drags you toward him like he’s got hooks in your soul.  “… _c’mere,_ ” you say, and then some part at the back of you points at the time of afternoon, nags that he’s been hurt and you gotta go slow.  You add, “—if you got a wanting to, little brother.”

“ _Mmm…_ ” Gamzee arches up a little bit, still sleepy, easy and slow, more a stretch than any more urgent thing.  “ _…yeah,_ fuck, ‘course.”

“Bless.”  You take the time to roll yourself a little forward and kiss him—heh, yeah, you ain’t surprised he makes that face after either, he tastes like fang scouring cream and smells like soap and pale sweetness, but you been at a long night and you didn’t wash up.  Gotta have awful evening breath.  “…my bad.”

“Nah.”  He kisses you back, mouth shut, just a little peck on the lips.  “There.  Fixed it.”

He looks so goddamn proud of himself, and you wrap him up in one arm and pull him closer.  He turns his face to you, more breathing than to kiss or to bite, and it feels nice in the slowest way, all sunny and soft.  He purrs and rolls his head back, and you take that as how it’s all for sure meant and nip his neck, as gentle as pain knows to be.  

His hands shiver a little bit as he holds you, and that’s all you can see to show he’s less than whole.  That there’s still scars in him you need to gentle your claws around.  Hate as all you may have in your pusher for Vantas, but he is a goddamn _miracle_ worker.  Raunchiest little pale concubine as he would make, with his horns so small like they been filed down and his mouth twisted up like it does when he wants to yell at a fucker to get to cleaning their life the fuck up. 

You turn your thoughts away from that.  From another troll with little nubs of horns and eyes too bright, who looked at you too tender.  Who you thought for a couple dark and hungry nights of keeping for yourself.  Who you threw away for fear of the softness he put in you.  You can’t call up dusty shards of old diamonds now, not with a real and living matesprit pressed up to you.  Not with your little one waiting on you. 

You been keeping him waiting a couple seconds, hesitating as you thought back—he’s getting all to squirm and shift.  You growl a little bit at him, just playing, and nip again right by the edge of one gill-slit to remind him you love him.

“ _Mmm,_ ” he says again, and his face is all sweet and soft.  He’s painted still.  You don’t offer to take it off.  “ _Mmmm…_ ahh yeah brother, please…”

His hand goes down you slow and sleepy and slides down between your legs, not hardly moving but to shift his fronds real slow and let you do the moving for him.  His eyes are still shut and his hands feel so fucking good, and you pull his hair in big, slow handfuls in return, rubbing his horns and neck and head almost more than you pull to hurt.  He sighs with his eyes shut and kisses all the skin he can reach, so lazy and sleepy still he’s less kissing and more breathing against you, tasting your skin.  You hear him whisper, murmur too low to make out, except once words as might be _love how you hurt me, fuck,_ and _keep hold on me_ and _so fuckin’ safe._ You whisper things to him—little words, things you’ve said before, hazy and dreamy and warm, _little brother_ and _feel so fucking nice_ and _you’re back you’re safe you’re a miracle all your own s’good it’s so fuckin’ good…_

You wake up and it’s warm and sleepy-still and he’s fallen back asleep too, one hand curled purple-stained and empty between you, the other one half in his mouth like a goddamn wriggler.  He sucks on his fingers and bites at his knuckles as he sleeps, and it’s fucking adorable.  You must’ve both fallen asleep like that, you too tired to get off and him too sleepy to try to finish you—you feel a little bit sticky but your bulge is sheathed again and there’s no urgent need for getting off. 

You are, however, considerable more awake than you were last time, and you reach out and shift him up against you, pull him up against your thorax.  For a second he goes tight all over like he means to fight.  You make to let go of him, doubting sudden, but then he loosens up again. 

“ _…hey,_ ” he says.  Barely moves his lips, eyes still shut, so as like a motherfucker could doubt that moving him even woke him from dreaming.

“ _Hey,_ ” you say back, close against the fin on the shell of his ear, and he shivers.  “ _…morning._ ”

“ _…morning._ ”  He says back, and nuzzles up in your neck.  “… _ry…?_ ”

“Mm?”

“ _…tell a motherfuckin’ story at me?_ ”

You weren’t expecting, but it endears at you.  You give him half a laugh, let your head fall back and close your eyes, winding up your fingers in his hair while you think.  “…story about what?”

“ _Dunno._ ”  He presses himself tight to you like a scared wriggler hiding, and you…remember.

“…I ever tell you what it was like when I was a wriggler?”

He pulls back away from you so he can look to your face, and his eyes are all bright.  Wonder comes old and tired to his eyes, now, but come it does.  Worn and battered, he is, but young still and there’s brightness they couldn’t snuff out.  “No,” he says, “not as I recall.  Holy shit though, really?”

“We had adults on-planet, then,” you say, and he settles down and back, watching your face behind the paint, listening real good.  You close your eyes and put yourself back, back and back and so far back, hushing down your voice like talking loud would scare the memories away.   “ _I’d hide in my hive when adults came through,_ ” you say, and with your eyes shut you can almost feel it, smell it, see it—the dark of your wardrobifier as you crouched in it with your clubs out, the smell of the sea air, the sound of deep, chittering voices loud outside.  Looting through your stuff without a single shit given who lived there or whose stuff they snatched.  “ _Dad would scare them off sometimes, if he figured he’d wanna come up out the water._ ”

“Your lusus got his bad self up to hive?”  He sounds wondering at the thought, at the motherfuckin’ concept of a lusus who’s there more than not. 

“Don’t figure he expected for his big open bay bein’ one big tide pool,” you remind.  “He came and went free for a couple sweeps, then one time he was there, messiahs brought down storm and thunder and the cliff fell down and cut us away from the ocean.  There was all underwater caves and shit, fish came up through for him to eat, but he couldn’t never fit through those.  He stayed because he had to.”

“He loved you though,” Gamzee says, and you get a powerful hurting inside at just how bad you can hear him want to believe that.  Believe that either one of your lusii was more than what they were.  “Loved you to fight off the grown-ass trolls who came through, you said.”

You want to tell him no, tell him he didn’t deserve how he was left alone, tell him all as how he shouldn’t waste love on a creature that ain’t got no inclination for loving back.  But you squeeze him instead, and put your face in his hair.  “…yeah,” you say, and remember those great purple and gold eyes lookin’ down on you.  “…sure.  Maybe he motherfuckin’ did.”

“You look like me?”  he threads his fronds through your hair, for all it’s no pleasure to touch out at the ends where it’s old and wiry and wild.  “…short hair and all?”

“Well, I’d not have ever had hair like your palemate,” you say, and almost laugh at the thinking of it.  You, back then with short-ass hair?  Fuck no.  “—I wasn’t jokin’ before.  It’s indecent, that shit, even if he didn’t got the tiniest most stunted horns ever.  You know what they do truly say about trolls with the smallest horns, and then with his hair all chopped off short like that, horns bared down right to the motherfuckin’ root like some… _pile for hire_?  Ain’t motherfuckin’ modest.  Wasn’t in my time.”

“It’s still your time,” he says, earnest like he thinks you’re hurt at the thought, and having him back is such a sweet comfort you really do have to laugh this time.  He’s purple at the ears with the sentiment of Vantas’s delicate, sensitive little horns and their bared softness, and you have a love for him great and deep and abiding.

“My time was a hundred on a hundred sweeps ago, grublet,” you say, and pull him up closer to you.  “… _back when Gamblignants would bring fleets in strength past ocean hives on the look for slave flesh and there was Orphaners in great shoals that left the water all colors in their wakes._ ”

He shivers a little, eyes shut like he’s imagining, and you wonder if he can.  If the world is so different now from how you get your recall of it on. 

“…church was on the roam and ramble, back then,” you say, and now he opens his eyes, half turns to see you.  His ganderbulbs are all sparkling and bright, the eagerness is for one time in so long untainted by the hurts done to him so raw and recent.  For the minute his pains are forgot and you could tell him stories forever if it would give him this.  You would speak your throat bloody.  “They tracked out purples, went to their hives and set up silent in daytime.  I slept one day when I was…messiahs, I was no older then than you were when you came to the fleet.  Not ten yet.  I slept and I got a good wake on when they started up the act at sunset, all the rowdy and bright outside my gaze-panes.  I came out for a fight but I saw…”

For a minute, you can’t find the words.  The memory is so bright still, the colors unfaded like the most brilliant of paints in your thinkpan.  Great holes and blurs you memory may have, tens of sweeps where no single bright point stands out to you, but that moment.  That _second,_ when you stepped out of your hive and stopped and turned and stared…

There’d been painted faces, bright colors.  There were songs and chants and prayers and throw-downs and adults and wrigglers and _family_.  There was real fuckin’ good cluckbeast on a stick, too. 

Gamzee listens to you as you talk slow through what you remember—through the sight of laughsassin, contorturenist and clown, juggler and subjugglator, the smells of elixir and blood and wax paint.  You conjure for him the feel of the silk tents, back when you had a real Big Top and more than a cathedral ship floating in the black—back when the ships going out to make colonies far off were the empress’s dalliance with the greatness she craved and not the way and matter of the empire, whole and entire.  Oh the church fleet flew even then, but the _circus,_ the home land of the church’s birth, it was on Alternian soil and under Alternian moons, getting rowdy in the sweet spice of the forests in dark season, praying silent under the cleft-flat ridges of hazy, endless mountains where your lights could put shadow-shows on the cliffs, burning the corpses of family gone away on the black-gold sands of the beaches with lanterns in every color turning the sea to dancing gleams of rainbow light…

You don’t realize you’ve slowed to a stop until his frond touches your face.  You blink, look up—he’s watching you with a tender eye, with a look so frightening close it makes you want to hide from it.  Like you’re being seen through, deep into you.

“…you miss it,” he says, and it ain’t in no way a question.  “…miss how it used to be.”

You can’t tell him you don’t.  Can’t put the words in your mouth, because you know them untrue. 

“ _…just wish I could_ show _you_ ,” you say instead, and your voice all but breaks, the regret and the yearn in you is so strong and sudden.  There’s a knot in your choke and you can’t seem to talk it away or swallow it down.  The memories are so old, and stay yet so bright, but the sweetness of them is tainted bitter by the knowing that you can’t ever get it back.  Not now.  You can’t have that, and he’ll never see it with his own eyes.  Never settle on the land of his home planet as the sun starts to rise, set up tent and drink the day’s blessing before sleep.

“… _you’re hivesick,_ ” he says, and it’s like it’s a wonder to him.  He reaches out and touches you, just the touch of claw on cheekbone, so gentle.  So fucking gentle.  “Oh, big brother—”

“I might be one of the last of the ones remembering,” you say, and that hurts too, to think, to know you’re all that holds that old, glowing time still in your pan.  How many are still with you as lived then?  A handful, no more. “I stepped off planet and back like it was nothing, we all did.  The empress said she needed us to go out round to the colony worlds, find the other purples and bring them together under our banner—under _her_ ruling.  Then the cult in bloody red made show, and then the riot of beasts, and then there was no more hive for us there.  Uprooted, cast off into the dark.”

He looks at you like he wants to understand, but you know he doesn’t.  Know he _can’t,_ not really.  Alternia was hive to him, but it was a shell.  Raised up in the full knowing he would leave it permanent and forever one night, from the time he was old enough for words, he was ready. 

“…we stepped off our world,” you say again, and the hurt aches sharp and unexpected, like you’ve uncovered an ancient wound never closed.  “…we stepped off with no intent of goodbye, and it was taken from us with no chance of reconcile.”

Gamzee is watching you, eyes all soft and dark and wet, and you know he pities you and you can’t find yourself to mind.  “…but you got us still,” he says, and presses his forehead up to your thorax. 

“Yeah,” you say, and when you wrap a hand around the curve of his skull he jerks a second like he wants to raise his claws to you and then gets himself under control. You can feel him so thin and so scarred under your hands.  They tried to take him from you, but for all you couldn’t keep hold on your planet, him you still have.  The tents and mayhem are gone, but the painted faces that filled them are still there.

“…yeah,” you say again, and pull him close, bruised and broken and too precious to hold.  “…You I do have.”


	30. I Renounce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not to mix two memes, but SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER!!! I BET YOU THOUGHT YOU'D SEEN THE LAST OF ME.
> 
> Happy 4/13 you filthy animals.

The day after, Gamzee comes to you same as the first.  Seeking and silent and shy, wanting but not wanting to say so.    This time though he finds you in the sopor, and he lies turned the other way from how he did.  Lies looking at you as you wake yourself up, lies looking at you as you reach out and trace all up and down the lines of his thin cheeks with a single claw-tip.  He shivers when you trace the socket of his ganderbulb.  You remember how he pulled from Karkat, and don’t do as you want and trace a finger past his lip to feel the soft of it.  Just hold his face in the palm of one frond and let your thumb rest there at the corner of his mouth, pushing it up a little bit, a mockery of his sweet smile.

“ _You keep coming at noon like you might as well be the best of motherfuckin’ daydreams,_ ” you tell him, real soft, and he blinks up at you and smiles just a little bit on his own.  He seems evener yet since last you saw him, leveled out even more—you’ll think as you like of your kismesis, but Karkat does do good work in a pile.  Born motherfucking conciliatrix, that one.

But it’s not conciliating Gamzee’s looking for this time, not your little brother.  He’s got things other in his sights, and you can feel the fear hum a little in his horns but you also see him look at you determined.  He turns his head, puts lips to your big scarred-up knuckles. 

“Okay now,” you say, and he flicks his eyes up at you sharp and sudden like he’s scared those words are the start of a denial.  You feel his fear a second late, rising to a whine in your pan and down your spine.  “Whoa, get your chill on now.  No fear, just…checking in.  A motherfucker can’t countenance doing wrong at you right now.  Better talk now than later when I put a frond in a place unwanted and it puts fear of blasphemy in you.”

“I can handle it,” he says.

“Little one.”

“I _can,_ ” he says again, stubborn and snapping, “Fuckin’ quit it with lookin’ at me like you could break me with a fingertip, I’m no—”

And then it fades back out of him again.  He stops.  He blinks and shakes his head.

“…sorry,” he says, diminished now.  “I’m…gettin’ it.  It’s being at pushing me around sometimes, it comes on me strong, but I got it.”

“What is?”

“Feeling,” he says, and pushes his fronds through his hair to hold his thoughtbox cupped in his palms.  “Get a powerful thought of feeling in me sometimes, no reason or holy rhyme.  But I do—I still…” he looks up at you, and there’s a tone of pleading in his eyes.  “Missed you,” he says, and the claws he’s got in your pusher pull hard and rip at you, pulling your pump-sponge to a cracked-open mess. 

“Missed you too, little brother,” you tell him, and tickle your claws up his sides.  When you slip a claw-tip up under the flap of his lowest fake gill, he catches up his breath and his body goes into a tight curve, pulled up tense by your touch.  “You figure you’re okay for this, then?”

“Yeah!” he says it eager, and you have to laugh just a little because for all that’s changed in him he still craves and yearns and wants after a friendly touch.   He throws himself to destruction with eyes all wide.

“But not to touch your mouth,” you say, listing off.  “Not to worship at you, and I’m making assumption you got no interest in going down pinned on your back either.”

He shudders a little.  “…not how I’d pick,” he says, but he hurries to add on, “—but if you want, I’m not gonna—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” you say, and swat him hard on the ass.  He jumps half a mile and squeaks like a grub, startled from his self-hurting bullshit.  “ _No_.  I got plenty of ways with you that don’t need you on your back.  The fuck do you think I am?  One creative motherfucker, me.”  And before you can keep hold on it, open to him and embarrassing-romantic like his own little pale diamond, you lean in to bump your pan to his.  “…I’ll do whatever I got to to make this motherfucker work,” you say, and know it for the cliché it is but you say it anyway.  “… _heart of mine._ ”

More feeling goes through him, fast and hard and jolting him up from toes to horns.  Doesn’t look like anger this time, though—his eyes stay all fixed to your face the whole time, and his face does something powerful painful, all wide, hurt eyes and soft, open mouth like he’s yearning at you even though you’re right there.  You hold on him, fronds on his shoulders and silent, letting him work through it and have it happen at him. 

“I,” he starts, and struggles with it, and it touches you somewhere deep and young to see him search for words, even as you feel an ancient spark of hate at the motherfuckers who  stole words out of him.  “I want…”

“I know what you want,” you tell him, and if you say it strong enough it’s like you even think it’s true.  “Not here though.  This motherfucker’s gotta get his clean on.”

You talk on nothings as you wash off, and you know by the way he stands and the turn of his voice that he’s nervous.  Like you ain’t had him before a hundred times.  He’s been away and been so hurt that the things that were familiar to him are strange now.  You got a powerful ache in you to make him soft again.  To fuck the tense out of him.  You wash sopor out of your hair and let be.  Talk to him about how the preaching went and the sermons he missed, about the missions you had to hand to others less capable like he was just out on leave to another fleet.  He don’t start at the topic of hurting things, and you don’t push. 

You can yet feel the unease in him, when you step out.  He shivers, and it sure as fuck ain’t from the warm of your room.  (Very little luxuries in seadweller-excess do you allow yourself, but a motherfucker can’t but warm up his respiteblock when the option’s there.  Fuck, that feels nice.)   He makes no mention, still.  You follow that lead.

…messiahs, but his head comes up a fair touch closer to your chin than you got your recall on of. 

He jumps when you take his arm, and then remembers you and who you are and lets you pull him around in the door of your pailing block to kiss him, easing the walk there with distraction.  Setting him down at the platform’s edge without breaking away from him, letting him feel instead of making too-painful thought.  But you gotta pull back in the end.  Just to breathe, and look at him.

“…hey,” he says at you, and reaches up careful with his hand that got broke, presses his fingertips at your cheek and smiles small and sad and tired.  His wrist’s still got bandage wrapped all up and down it, rough on your paint, and you wonder for not the first time how exactly it came to break.  What those filthy motherfuckers did to him exactly and entirely, where you couldn’t see and how you couldn’t ever ask him to tell.

“Kurloz?”

Fuck.

“Yeah,” you say, late and slow. 

“Where’d you go?”  he tries at a smile like it’s a joke, but there’s worry and hurt in his eyes.  Fuck, _fuck,_ you didn’t have no single intention in you to cause him more sadness today. 

“Nowhere worth motherfucking speaking at,” you say easy and warm, and pull him up to you.  “Call me a fossil as your nubby-ass little palemate would, but this old thinkpan does take to motherfucking roaming some nights.  C’mere.”

It’s easy, for a stretch after that.  Words are hard, looking and thinking are hard, but kissing him, pulling his hair, rubbing his horns and biting his lips, that comes natural.  He never quite eases for you, and that stings and aches in the core of you, but it’s more yet than you expected, how he comes to you and lets you have him.  You find yourself struck in waves with words for him, trying to make known at him how precious he is to you.  “… _You deserve the sweetest of things,_ ” you tell him, and trace up his back with both fronds, holds his sides, so strong but so fucking fragile under your claws.  “Only ever the sweetest, brother—”

He goes all tensed again.  You pause, feeling that twitch of fear in him. 

“What?”

He blinks at you all innocent, but you know by the guilty flick of his fins he knows he’s been caught.  “Huh?”

“Don’t you _huh_ at me, you nervy little fucker,” you growl, and hit his ass.  He squeaks, then gives you a look all reproach.  “What’s goin’ on?  You tell me why you feel afraid at me, because I’m gonna fix the fuck outta it.”

“Oh,” he says, and “no,” he says, and “—I’m good, it’s cool.”

“ _Gamzee._ ”

His ears droop down low.  He looks at you pleading, but you won’t be moved on this one—you gotta know. 

“Tell me what’s going on,” you say, and loom up in his space.  “… _now._ ”

Makes him groan in his thorax when you growl at him like that, same as ever has.  Softens his mouth, spreads his fins and darkens up his eyes.  But you don’t bend down to let him kiss you.  Just wait, let him realize you want your answers by any means.  Watch him make himself think on it and then throw words together in his pan.

“…you…you’re real tender at me,” he says, finally.  “And that’s—good!  Fuck.  But, brother.  So were they.  It’s just…real close still.”

He winces down when he says it, like he expects you to growl at the mention, the comparison.  You keep your face al cool and still, ride out the jolt of hurt at _you’re the same as them_.  That’s not what he’s sayin’ at you, and you’ve got the pan-matter to know that.  Okay.  Well, fuck.  Okay.

“I can hurt without worship,” you point out, and he looks at you uncomprehending, all big eyes and confusion.  You take him and lift him up so he sits up against the pailing platform’s head, facing you.  Take his wrists in your hands and as you lean in to kiss him to fold them behind his head, so his fingers tie up in his own wild curls.  So his whole pretty thorax is laid out for you. 

When you slap him across the face he goes _hhhuh—!_   Big gasp of air in his shock, his head snaps to one side with the force of it.  You pull back, wait to see how he takes it.

He shakes a minute, then breathes a minute, then looks up and his eyes are clearer.  Cleaner and brighter. 

“Better?”  you take the cheek you just touched, cup it in a palm and rub a thumb at the cool arch of his cheekbone.  He’s so fucking beautiful.  You want to tell him so, but god knows if they told him the same, if your love for him is poisoned with their want now and if he’ll be able to accept your kindness again.  You’ll be cruel for however long it takes.  You’ll love him in every way left to you. 

You’re going to hurt him black and blue and bloody.

“I’m listening,” you tell him, and he watches you with a look you don’t rightly know.  “You know how to make me stop, little one.  You know I’ll stop for you.  Whenever and whyever, littlest most precious motherfucker, any time, any reason.  Say it to me.”

“ _Stop_ ,” he whispers, and the word sounds like he ain’t sure how to say it, like it scares him to.  You chirr and croon and pet his hair and kiss him again.  “Stop.  I…any time.  Any motherfucking reason.”

“You start to get fucked up about the hurt they did you, what do you tell me?”  You’re talking gentle into his lips, but there’s something fierce and big and hot inside your thorax and it comes out with the weakest tender shake of your voice.  His breath shudders like yours. 

“Stop,” he says.  “…tell you ‘stop’.”

“You get scared I’ll do you some hurt you don’t want?”

He don’t need pushed this time.  He takes his hands away from behind his head and reaches to you instead, tight-grasping hands in your shirt, holding you so close. 

“… _stop,_ ” he says, and it’s all but a sob, he sounds so grateful to say it. 

“And if you want me to not touch you any more,” you say, and pull back to look him in the eyes.  “…no matter how I’m like.  I could be a couple seconds off from finishing up I don’t give a shit, _what do you tell me_?”

He shudders at that—fights himself inside.  You don’t prompt or push.  Just watch him.

“…I’ll…say ‘stop’,” he says.  Breathes deep like just saying it was something he needs recovering from.  “I’ll ask a motherfucker to stop.  I will.  Fuck—” and he leans in and kisses you again, deep and hungry.  “… _now just fuckin’_ get your move on _already,_ ” he grumbles, but you can hear the shake in his voice like he wants to cry again.  “…before my bulge gets bored and fucks off back in again.”

You laugh at that, and manhandle him on up into your lap.  “Like hell chance of that,” you say, and tap your claws on his thighs, points-first and just enough to feel the sharp. He shivers, solid little wave of shudder that goes up from his feet to the top of his head.  “I’m putting caegars to beetles you’re trying real hard just to not unsheathe right now, and I hardly even touched you yet.”

He ain’t relaxing yet but he doesn’t flinch up at your words and your touches either, and you’ll take that for the second as the gift it is. Keep talking, doing what’s best to you to keep him in the now and here.

“Tell me a scripture, little one,” you say, and busy yourself at moving him around.  He’s no wriggler now, not so small as you could wrap him up entire in your arms, but you can still lift him and rearrange as you want.  “Speak at me from Beginnings.”

“Oh.”  He frowns a second, thinks on it, and you settle him back with his back to the head of the platform and comfort padding all around him, lounged out all across sheets in your color like a goddamn painting.  “Uh… _When it started we had fuck-all but dark…_ ”

You let him talk a while, just talk as you touch him.  You’re not gentle.  Startle and jolt and shove him around a little, slam his hands back pinned so you can put mouth to his gills and drag fangs past the flaps.  He stutters and then huffs and then groans for you, breaking up holy word with soft, panting silences.

“And when,” he starts again after one of those silences, and his toes curl where they’re up against your leg, you see muscle work up his legs and in his hips.  “—when the last world was all fit together, m-messiahs looked on it and said—motherfucking money.  _Ah_ and they threw—stardust down, and it hit mud and it made dirtbloods, baked all dry enough like they could crumble if you breathed wrong.  And it hit water and it made waders, wet, cold, mirthless salty motherfuckers with too much eye for their own motherfucking sparkle.  But where it hit sand it made— _ffffffuck,_ brother—!  Do that again—”

“Keep talking, faithful,” you tell him, and from your own mouth the old address sounds less archaism and more goddamn pet-name.  Makes him blush and then twitch at feeling and then go still again, blinking up at you too fast. 

“…uh…” he stops, trying to find his place, trying to recall chapter and verse, then he starts again faster and shaky.  “—and—a-and it made trolls out of sand, all capricious as fuck and changing with the water.  Trolls who could go hard or give when they had to.  All balanced on the universe high wire and not ever falling sea-side or ground-side but right there on their line like the acrobatterers they were.”

“From the sand were made the faithful,” you intone for him, and let your fronds follow your words.  “From the beachwood their horns, their goddamn bone snapped off from sea-floor stones on mountains under the water.  And what they made was Troll.”

“Only that,” he murmurs, and tilts his head back, turns his face to some distant glimpse of the paradise planet to be.  “…just that and no motherfucking more.”

“And you’re no more than that,” you tell him, and he nods with eyes still closed and listens at your word.  “Just a troll, ground-bound wants and body’s needs, you’re no _messiah._ ”

“ _Never was,_ ” he says, so soft, like it’s a relief. 

“You never were,” you repeat back, and take a long pull at his hair, tug his head back and kiss him as he takes a sudden little breath and softens under you. “By Messiahs’ mercy.”

“Amen,” he answers back at you, and opens his eyes clearer than you’ve seen him yet for nights on end. 

“There,” you say, and stroke back his hair, let it fall back to his eyes.  It’s getting longer again.  “See, now, lies are all they motherfuckin’ are.  Lies on lies.  Figure it’s on me to help get you all reminded.”

“Yeah,” he says, and drops his head back.  For a second, something snaps up through him again—he feels.  He shudders of feeling, he flinches and shakes through it.  Then it’s gone again.  He breathes out.  “…no motherfucking more.”

“I’ll do no praising of bullshit spirituals you got no claim to,” you tell him, and he shudders out a breath.  It’s hard to read, even to you—you stop, pull back and look him over cautious.  But it doesn’t seem to you you made too bold, talking on the cult’s fake-ass teachings.  Seems to you it’s good he’s hearing it.  Like that’s maybe even what he needed.

“Well,” he starts, and swallows.  “...what are you gonna do instead?”

You pin him back and up, not on his back but sitting up, and he goes still and cold for a second and then melts for you when you kiss him, all but gentled, almost giving in.  There’s still a piece of him that hangs pinned, stabbed through with his hurt, frozen with the fear they put in him, but all for that one piece he give under.  He lets you take him away.  Lets you bite down his neck, across his chest, lets you muscle up in between his legs and coax him open for you.

“ _This is the only way as how you should be worshipped_ ,” you murmur in his skin, and he bites down on his lip and tries to close his legs, sleepy and blushing and breathless.  “Oh no.  You sit and let me look at you, little one.  You just stay where you are.” You leave kisses up his long legs, whisper to him as you go—how you love the smooth pull and tense of the muscles in them, the soft places on the insides of his thighs.  When he blushes and groans and tries to rub his thighs together, you pull back and give him a look that makes him go purple to the ears.

“…you want tied up?”

He don’t answer but to stare off a little past you and blush and squirm.  His eyes flick to you once and then, real slow, deliberate so you can see, he pushes in on your hands on his thighs, playing like he wants to close them.  Well fuck.  You’d call that a yes. 

“Fine,” you say, and when you pull out a skull you crush it in one palm and squeeze his thigh so hard with the other hand you know he’ll bruise.  He grunts soft and breathless and shivers.  Nothing fancy today—soft ropes, in your color like you like him—it looked good on his silver skin before he grew for you, and it looks motherfucking gorgeous now, bright and clean against grey-black plates and the little constellation-points of scars across his body.  His legs you can hold for yourself, but his arms, now, his arms you’ll have to do some special work on.

“Arms up,” you say, and nudge his chin up.  “Cross—yeah.”  He knows what you want.  Puts a wrist by each opposite horn, so his arms cross over his head.  You lean in over him to tie wrist to elbow to horn and he bites his lip and kisses and nips at your thorax as you try to work and you missed him so much and so powerful and sharp.  The feel of his skin is miraculous and familiar and Messiahs but he’s beautiful, wasted and scarred and worn out as he is.  The spark of faith and soul that lights him up from the inside still shines out at you. 

“Look at this,” you murmur, up close to his skin, and trace the lines of his belly with your fingers—he twitches and makes a soft sound.  “Like messiahs carved you out all perfect for me.”

He mumbles something.  You prop up your chin on his hip and look up at him.  “…say again, little one?”

“…all struts and skin, me,” he says, and kind of shifts around, and you see his eyes too bright and his face all purple.  “—too—fuckin’—just a ugly-ass skeleton up in— _hhnnh_ …”  For a second, hurt and pain and sadness flare up in him like the rage sometimes does, and he bends with the force of it.  Doubles down at the press of his hate on himself.  “I’m not…I’m not.  _Perfect._   ‘M not even fuckin’ _good_ —”

Hurts, hearing him say that.  You shake your head, firm and slow, and kiss his hip. 

“…not what I see, beloved,” you say, and cup the angles of his thoracic cage in your palms.  His gills flutter a little under your fingers.  “…No.  I can see the bones in you, sure.”  You trace them—thoracic struts, curves and arches and juts of bone under skin.  “…can see your pusher beat and your breath and all the ways you work…” you drag a claw a little—see all the muscles tense, all the ways he shiver and shakes.  “… _fuck_ , you’re beautiful as all good goddamn, you pretty little doubter.”  He sniffs—again, louder, blinks too hard.  “— _you beautiful motherfucking mess._ ”

“ _Stop,_ ” he says.

You sit up and pull back your hands, cold in the pit of your thorax—but he’s not panicking.  Doesn’t cry.  Just looks at you, and there’s a dazed brilliance in his eyes like he just saw a miracle.

“… _fuck,_ ” he says, and you don’t figure you’re imagining how his voice breaks just a little on the word.  “—s…sorry, fuck, I just—”

“—just needed to remind yourself?”  You keep the tone of your voice slow and steady.  “You’re mine but you’re yours too.  You know I’d do you better than that, little brother.”  You trace just the slightest small line on the curve of his hip.  “…is it good, remembering?”

“The fucking _best,_ ” he says, all but a sigh, and pushes up, still shaking and weak but always stronger, to kiss you.  “ _Very best._ ”  He slumps back, and you wrap him up in an arm to slide a cushion behind him so he can settle, splayed out vulnerable and hurt.  “—mm.  ‘S good, thanks.”

“No problem.”  Settling up against him to kiss him, you can feel his thorax shudder with each breath.  He’s not delicate, not breakable, but now he feels like it.  Your fear turns him to glass.

“…you could get your move on though.”  He sounds hazy, happy and sweet and not urgent despite the words.  “Just sayin’.”

“Well, I could.”  For a second you’re wicked, hungry—but you’re so tired, still, and he’s so tired still and not either of you has the power left in you for playful give and take.  You both came through alive, but you’re so worn by what’s been done to you.  “…or I could hold you here.” You give a nipple a little tweak just to make him squeak and jump and jolt out of his haze.  “And I could tell you all of what makes you the most beautiful and precious little faithful motherfucker I ever got the pleasure to touch.”

“ _Nhhh,_ ” he says, and it’s humiliation and self-doubt that sets him shuddering, you know.  “ _—please—_ come on, _no, ‘m not—Kurloz don’t—_ ”

“Don’t?” you repeat back, and don’t move.  Wait on his word.  “Or _‘stop’_?” 

He meets your eyes, and you see in him that hesitating pain, that deep, deep hurting.  That terror that comes on him when you try to tell him just how wanted and beloved he is.

“…d…don’t,” he says again, and you know you’re overwhelming him.  Not so he’d stop you, not hurting him like that, but overwhelming.  “No” and “don’t” and “please” aren’t quite themselves when his body spits them out in his throes of agony—but they're warnings, sometimes.  Leaders-up for that “stop”.  “Stop” you would never overlook.  That word is his power over you, the leash that holds you.  That word makes him safe.  _Don’t,_  though...mm. _Don’t talk to me like that, too gentle, too soft, don’t tell me I’m valued, don’t take hold of the core of me it’s too much.  It’s_ too much. 

You ease back a little, pet his thorax and kiss his belly as he settles, still teary and shaking. 

“…all truth, little one,” you say, low and sweet as you know how, and love again on the sharp little curve of one dark hipbone.  There’s the tiniest ridge of scale there—he shudders when you press open kisses along it, threaten but don’t bite.  “All that and more that I got no words good enough to tell you about.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” he says again, a little louder, little harder.  “Please.”

Fuck, but he’s hurting.  The more you see him hurt the more you want to be sweet with him, try to make him understand—but that’s not what he’s asking for and he needs you to give what he’s asking for now.  God you hope you know what you’re doing.  If you hurt him more at this moment you don’t know what you would do with yourself. 

You swallow more soft praise, lock back the words _let me gentle you, little one, let me hold you_. 

“I’m sorry,” you say instead, and force yourself to let words come from somewhere open and real and vulnerable.  It feels like falling.  “It’s.  Hard.  You got hurt.  And I don’t fuckin’ know how to fix it for you.”

He leans into his ropes and looks at you, and there’s something in his eyes, called up to meet the grudging admitting of your hurt.  Something tender, something that hurts like you do.  He doesn’t say a word, but you can’t look away from him.  The longer he looks at you the more you’re pulled apart.  Ripped open, battered to breaking, _god_ how can a look so gentle tear into you so deep?

“I don’t—know what to do _,_ ” you say before you can stop the words, and flinch from your own voice at the hatred for yourself that hits you at the echo of the words.  “—fuck.  Mother _f_ _uck,_ never mind, just—it’s not about what I want to do, little one, it’s not about what I think you should have, it’s what you want, just—tell me what you _want_!”

You didn’t hear your voice rise, but the words tear ragged.  You didn’t feel your pusher pound but you have to stop to catch your breath.  Your eyes burn, aching.  Fuck.  Fuck fuck _fuck_ no FUCK. 

“…untie my hands?”  he says it soft, coaxing.  It’s something to do with yourself, something you’ve been told to do, finally.  It’s a simple knot—more to reassure than to hold—and a pull takes it apart. 

When you start to sit back he reaches out and takes hold, and your throat knots up.  For a second it’s all you can do not to pull away—his touch is worse than his eyes, reaches down into you and pulls at the cracks in your armor.  You’re so motherfucking tired.  You’re so _fucking_ tired of being scared for him and for your church.  So tired of doing all you can and not knowing if it’s for the best or if it’ll break everything you love.  So _tired_ of all of it. 

“ _I’m tired,_ ” you say, and he groans soft and hurting in the back of his throat and pulls you closer.

“ _Me too._ ”  Presses up to you and puts his face in your hair by the root of one horn.  Breathes you in.  “…big brother? _”_

Shakes you.  You don’t answer.

“…Kurloz _,_ ” he says, stronger, and hesitates just a second, holds you close and still.  “…let a brother take care at you?”

So pathetic so stupid so _weak_ , how did you even live this way, how did the Messiahs not strike you off the face of the universe?  You’re so fucking _weak._

“You’re the one hurt,” you say, but it’s barely a resistance and he trails his claws down the side of your throat, soft and humming through your skin, sweet with the emptiness, the lack of threat.

“You said you wanted me to tell you,” he says, and his grip on you is shaking, weak, wasted, but there’s gentle want in his voice.  “It’ll help.”

“But—” _ask me for something else, ask me anything else, ask me to bleed and suffer don’t ask me to keep falling don’t ask me to show you my face like this—_

It’s not safe.  It’s a weak place, a broken place, a place where you’ve locked up the parts of you you never wanted to see again.  That’s where they forced him and that’s what he’s asking you for and god you have no fucking clue if you’re strong enough to give it to him.

“They need me strong _,_ ” you say, and you know you’re making excuses with the words.  He doesn’t let go of you.  “I can’t _—_ ” 

“You can, I fuckin’ promise you can.”

“But _you_ need—” you try to start, and he leans himself down awkward to one side and kisses you quiet.

“I don’t know what I need,” he says, and holds your face in his hands to turn it to him.  “Brother, I don’t _know._   And you don’t either, that’s what’s got you fearing. “

“I don’t want you flipping on me.”

“I’m not.”  He breathes you in, pulls you in against him.  “… _I won’t._   Palemate’s not the only one, gets to see right down at the insides of you.  And I don’t feel pale.  Not a shade like how I get for Karkat, that’s not how I feel at you.”  And then, as you start to open your mouth, as you begin at trying to speak, “…you’re putting walls up, big brother.  Don’t you figure I can’t hear you comin’ up with problems tryin’ to push me away.”

And you could fight, you could argue, but you know it’s true.  Nobody like church to see through a mask.  You breathe out and let him rest your face in his shoulder.  If you’re to let him feel strong, you got no choice but to let yourself be weak.

“…why you gotta make me motherfucking work for shit?” you ask him, and he laughs a little bit.  “… _missed you_.”

“Missed you too.”  He picks his claws at your hair, the ripples of your horns.  “…knew you’d fear for me, knew you’d…you’d get all torn up over what they did to me.  _They scare you so bad,_ ” he croons, and it’s true, and it _hurts_ , and your claws dig at his back.  “ _Nnh—_ sorry I scared you, sorry I—”

“Not your fault,” you say, but your breath’s not controlled and it shakes hard and open before you close your mouth tight again.  Shakes your head.  _You didn’t do_ shit _and you owe me no apology_ —

“But you went in after me,” he says, and wraps himself up around you, puts his face to the root of a horn and breathes you in.  “In at the place where your daymares live, killed your way through and came for me, you wouldn’t let them have either motherfucking one of us, wouldn’t ever let them own you like that—”

“He’s in my head,” you tell him, and he knots his fingers up in your hair and nods, _I know, I know._   “Always, all ways and motherfucking times they’re in my fucking _thinkpan_ , I can’t get him out—”

“Some shit you can’t control.”

“No!”  It bursts out loud and snarling, like the words are something you can fight off, “—no, that won’t be born, I won’t _fucking_ allow that!  By grace of messiahs we are tasked to overcome—”

“So they send you what you could’ve been, in dreams _,_ ” he says, and you stop.  You freeze.  “They show you what he would’ve been and say _disciple, well done_.”

It’s so wrong, so completely turned around from everything you’ve known for hundreds of sweeps, you can’t barely breathe.  Your air gasps in and out of you, your throatstem locks up around it.  _Disciple, well done._ That your dreams could be from messiahs, you never thought on.  That He could be anything but curse and blasphemy, you never countenanced.

“Like in Revelries,” he says, and rocks you a little as you stay still and not moving, stare without seeing.  “ _Oh that I’m of use to you, blessed rulers of my soul, all times and ways and places, my idle rest is to watch your great holy show and my dreaming to hear the holy motherfucking noise._   Like…and you always gotta get tempted, too, showed bad shit.  But every time you fight it away, that’s you winning.  You’re winning over him.  Because you’re here and you’re real and he ain’t nothing but bad dreams.  Shows you shit to make you pay for having what he won’t ever.  ‘ _Look what you didn’t turn to’._ ”

“That’s…” you stop. Marshall back your voice into some form of control.  “…that’s a real pretty thought, little one.”

“Don’t mean it’s not some form of true,” he says, because he knows you better than to think that means you believe it.  You see him feel something—sharp shudder all up and through him—he grits his fangs down on it and shakes, then falls back still again as it goes.  “ _Nnh_ you ain’t gotta get so harsh on yourself, bro.”

“I do,” you return.  “Nobody else is gonna.”

“Meenah would,” he points out.  “Karkat would.”

“Yeah, well.”  You can’t deny that they do a powerful job of harshness on you, that’s for fucking sure.  “Fuck them.”

“Sure,” he says.  “Just don’t go telling at me about it.”

The hurting and poison air clears after that, and you don’t feel that aching pit in you quite so deep but not either of you seems to be real keen to go back to what you were doin’.  You hit something deeper and harsher than either one was all wanting to dig into, you think—it’s with heavy pusher but the slightest thread of relief you sigh and push yourself up to get dressed, and he follows like he feels the same, shoulders round and tired, horns down.

“Just came up to say good night,” he says plaintively, and bends down to sort out through his thrown-aside clothes, picking at them, tugging on underclothes and pulling the drawstrings tight.  He’s so skinny still he has to double-knot them to keep  them from falling low on his hipbones, and he touches his own  skinny thorax once and flinches from it.  Shudders through a feeling, claws bending to do harm, and then forces himself still again.  You go through the familiar steps together—clothes and then chitin armor and then paints.

“Well, you got a joke played at you,” you say, and make a blessing with your frond, brush between your claws and voice all strange-hoarse to your sponge clots.  “Messiahs don’t like a simple show.  Gotta shake that shit up.  Gotta get us both spinnin’ outta this clown car and right in the motherfuckin’ murder pie.”

Gamzee’s acid sac makes a rumble so loud you hear it right across the block.  He jumps just about as far off the ground as he is tall again, stares down at himself and touches his thorax again, this time with less disgust and more curiousity. 

“Well fuck,” he says, like it’s a wonder to him.  “I’m hungry.  I’m fuckin’ _starving,_ holy shit!”

“Praise,” you say, honest and grateful, and he blinks and looks to you.  “You ain’t eating enough by half.  Go on now.  Don’t make yourself sick.”

“Yeah!”  He looks lighter yet, even, like just the hearing of his own body, the knowing of his own hunger, that’s something that warms him inside.  He looks at you strange a second, jitters where he stands and then takes a couple big steps on his long-ass legs and pushes himself up you to kiss your lips, smear the half-dried gray between the two of you from smile to smile.  “…flushed for you.”

Okay, fuck that responsibility noise, definitely headed right back to _turn him over the desk and make him wail_ territory now.  But he’s hungry, and you got stuff you gotta care for, and if you ain’t gonna sleep yet tonight you should as well get started on real-ass duties which you definitely shoulda been doing already.  Fuckin’ pain in the ass fuckin’ job.

“Flushed at you too,” you tell him, and kiss him back, just the once.  “Go on, get outta here.  I’ll see you another day.”

\--

There are four kinds of heretic.  The kind that recants easy, the kind that recants hard, the kind that dies fast and the kind that motherfuckin'...doesn't.

Of the Cult, you got a whole load of the kind that don't, all full of fangs and harsh words on your church, like they think after all the sweeps and sweeps you been through they can put a scratch on you now.  You were young, once, and they could hurt you with angry words from bloody mouths.  Well, not any-fucking-more.

Gamzee don't make much note of any interrogation you make, beyond the one he attends with all his pusher and soul.  He keeps to his self and makes quiet prayer to his gods and bloodies his claws up to the elbows with Uumbrage's blood.  You let him do it, mostly.  Your suffering is older, you got scars where your little one's got bloody wounds, and you're contented to take the rest of the cult and let him revenge himself on the one he hates most.  

And oh, he does hate.

"This is fucked up," says Karkat outside the interrogation window, hushed voice like he might be all talking in a holy place, precious little hateful little face all twisted up dislike and worry.  "Seriously, this isn't like him."

It’s been nights yet since Gamzee came to you the second time, since he pulled truths unwanted outta your heart and took comfort in scripture with you.  He’s better yet, now, than he ever was.  But he is…different.  Sharper.  You know the feeling.

"You figure he ain't got the right to it?"  You let your voice be steady, but there's a growl under it.  "After the heresy they visited on--"

"No, okay, I get what he's mad about."  Karkat frowns all the deeper, crosses his arms and taps his feet.  "...but it's still not like him.  It's like...all the hate he was supposed to spread out over the last...what, twenty-five sweeps? However long he's been alive, he's just been storing it up and now it's all coming out all at the same time."

"Mm."  You can see how he means, if you think about it like that.  Your little one has a fair bit of rage in him, sure enough.  He'll fight if he has to, but even the ones he went after with fang and claw he never seemed truly to hate.  That rare pleasure is reserved for the one wretched piece of troll-meat locked up in your interrogation blocks.  "...well, not a one made so much attempt at everything he holds close," you point out.  "Took issue at his religion on ways most blasphemous.  Made motherfuckin' ruin of his body, did heinous bullshit at his thinkpan, stole blood of your own freak color and forced it down his choke to make him testify on false-ass motherfucking gods...there ain't a single part of his being that motherfucker didn't tear out of him just to spit on."

The last of the words become a growl.  You cut yourself off to force yourself calm again, hide your fangs behind your lips and makes deep breaths with aching aeration sponges.  Karkat is watching you, sharp eyes bright and burning red, watching and staring and making note of you.

"Don't look at me like that, wriggler," you say, and he blinks and looks back ahead, watches through glass as Gamzee leans in near and does some work of knives and cruelty, of hate and fearful rage.  

"Just thinking," he says, and shrugs his shoulders, not looking up at you.  "...you care about a lot of the stuff he cares about.  So this guy fucked with both of you."

"Make your point," you say, as patient as mockery allows.

"I just don't see why you're not in there..." he waves a claw, then hazards at you, "... _making a wicked mockery of the holy ruckus._   Or whatever."

"Well," you say, impressed in spite of yourself.  "We'll make ringbait of you yet, little mutant freak as you are."

"No you fucking won't," he says.  "I just keep my spongeclots clear, that's all."  He winces when Gamzee does something fast and hard—a half a scream comes from the door, for all it’s made to keep it in.  “…I’ll talk to him when he comes out.”

“Sure you will,” you say, because fuck if you care.  Let him do pain, for one time in his life, instead of taking it.  Let him hurt and kill instead of having his strings pulled and his wants talked over and his pain wrote off.  The words come out a touch bitter-sharp, and Karkat gives you a real pointy-ass look and then shakes his head and scratches a little bit at the back of his head through his hair, like he’d touch his horns if he could. 

“…He needs to chill out,” he says, all stubborn.  “Somebody has to fucking tell him so, and it’s not gonna be you, that’s for damn sure.”

“And how do you figure at that?” 

“I know him,” Karkat says, and doesn’t look up at you.  Just watches Gamzee through the glass, eyes all red like burning coals.  “…better than I know anybody.  And you’re just like him.”

\--

“You’re _just like him,_ ” Uumbrage spits out.

You snarl out a laugh harsh and from your whole thorax, echoing around the block. Your claws tear four bleeding lines over the fucker’s thorax how you always wanted to do  while he withheld and visited his sufferings on you.  When he tried to make you bend for him and you got your righteous and powerful thirst on for his blood painting your skin.

“—nnh!” he grits his teeth on the noise, and that’s no good, no fucking good at all.  Not after he made you scream and cry and fucking _beg_ for his mercy.  You got scores to settle.  “You chose your path, and it’s _damnation_.”

No point listening at him, no point in hearing what he says—you grab a knife from the table and ignore his foul poison.  Things you’ve found haven’t been much or many, but you know now he can’t do his fear-making when he’s pained and shaken.  Takes a piece of his thinkpan, takes a focus he don’t have when you’re hurting him.  You got a powerful love in you of that knowledge.  That you’re taking even that from him, like he deserves.

“I want you to get your know on,” you tell him, sweet and gentle as he wanted you to be, smiling and peaceful.  “…’cause these first two ain’t fuck-all to do with my gods or your fakes.  This is for you watchin’ this motherfucker cry and pray mercy and you turning away.”  You paint your knife purple, draw through his skin and carve into his chitin plates until he makes noise of pain.   It’s a fierce, furious hunger that pain brings up in you—your fakey-ass calm voice wavers up into a snarl.  “This is for hunger, _brother._ This is for _thirst_.”  His blood is on your claws, it hits your face in drops that feel warm through your paint.  “For forcing _heresy_ out my motherfucking mouth just so I could stay breathing—you _beg_ me to forgive you!”

“ _Never_ ,” he says, and even chained up so, his disdain cuts so cold as to burn.  “I’m not going to let you soften the harshness of your knowing you were close to messiahs— _nnh_ —messiahs beyond your deserving and you threw it away, you _felt_ the truth of our message—”

“LIAR!” it roars out of you, snap of fury like you’d had the past perigee but no need now to withhold.  You lash out to him, claw open his face and tear at his heretic paint.  “You laid me _bare_ , you put your hands up in my body and up in my thinkpan but you didn’t _ever_ take my soul, you—you—”

You got no words dirty enough, no curse so profane as to say all the hate you feel for him.  You spit on him instead, furious and hating at the taste of bile in your choke.  Breathe a second, pant through your bared fangs, but it doesn’t hardly do shit for you and when your voice comes out again it’s still shaking.

“You don’t even deserve eternal most unfunny motherfucking damnation,” you say, and again you crack into a louder tone unbid, your voice rises to unsteady volume like Kurloz in a rage.  “YOU DON’T DESERVE TO SUFFER WITH THE WORST OF US!”  And it takes an endless second for you to pull it back in, to force yourself to bite back a scream.  Because if you let yourself rage, you’ll rage to his death.  If you let yourself go, you’ll kill him.  _Not yet.  Not yet._

“…You deserve _nothing_ ,” you finish, and you feel a thrill up your back for how those words finally seem to get to him, put the tiniest crack in his armor.  His slow, heavy breaths catch in his thorax for the barest second, and you want to dig your claws in his soul and _pull._ “I hope hell takes one look at your rotted soul and throws you out into the black to freeze forever in the loneliest never-death you ever felt a fear of.  _Heretic._ ”

You leave him there, bleeding in the dark.  You’ve not hurt him so bad you need to fix him up—he can hang there and feel those cuts burn in him for a while.  You hope your words burn him even more. 

You come back to your block and Karkat is waiting for you.

You walk in with bloody fronds, and find that he’s sitting in your pile of shit over at the corner, sitting up and waiting.  He looks up at you when you walk in, his ganderbulbs flick up and down at you, and they stop to linger on your hands and your bloody-splashed clothes.  You’re not— _ashamed,_ you’re not, you’re doing as you’re meant at doing.  But motherfuck if the way Karkat looks at you then doesn’t make a hard, hot some-kinda-shit close in your thorax.

“…hey,” he says, tight and quiet.  Not happy.  Your weak make at smiling fades. 

“Hey,” you say, and look down at yourself.  Scrub your hands at each other.  “Uh…hey.”

You both start to say at the same time—stop, start again. 

“Go clean up,” Karkat says, quiet.  “I need to talk to you.  Fuck.”  His eyes go from hands to face to bloody shirt again.  “ _Fuck,_ ” he says again, just breathing, and drags his hand at his face.  You get that feeling off him like you fucked up, but you _didn’t_ , you didn’t fuck anything up except the Uumbrage’s ugly fuckin’ face. 

Still feels like you fucked up, though.

Karkat is still waiting as you come out.  He’s got his uniform off and he’s dragging claws through his messed-up hair over and over and again.  Little motherfucker looks all harsh on himself.  On you.  On _something._  

“He deserves it,” you say.

Karkat blinks and looks up to you, and you feel like a goddamn fool all of a sudden, and not the fun-ass kind.  Skinny and scarred up and dripping still and half-dressed, answering questions he never said at you. 

“Uumbrage,” you clear up, and he looks less shocked but also even less easy.  “He deserves it.  All the shit he gone and motherfucking did—”

“I know!”  says Karkat, real quick and like hell he fucking does, he wasn’t fucking _there_! 

For a second you snap out of yourself, you feel foreign shapes painted on your holy face, feel chains pin you down and hear them whispering all around you—blasphemous scriptures, prayers for blessings you never claimed the right to give—

“—ee— _Gamzee!_ ”  Karkat is there with you, hands out but not touching, eyes all wide and red.  “Hey, hey hey.  Shoosh.  No, I know he—I know, everything they did to you, you deserve payback.  Fuck, you really do.  But…” 

“ _But?_ ”  You don’t want to be harsh at him, but fuck it you _do_ , you want him to get his _fucking know on_ , because you know what this is about no matter how hard he tries to hide it at you.  “But _what_ , best friend?  But _fucking what?!_ ”

“…I’ve seen trolls turn…ugly,” he says, and chews his lip with his big, precious, clumsy-ass fangs.  “Something happens that hurts them and they just…I don’t fucking know, they heal back wrong, or nobody bothers to talk to them about it, so they never talk, or—” He shrugs that away.  “—and they end up all fucking…cold.  I thought for sure that wasn’t you, but…watching you in there with that slimy sadistic shitheel…”

He can’t look at you in your ganderbulbs, and your guts are sinking through the floor and freezing in open space.  Now the anger’s gone you feel crushed small out of existence and like you’re blowing apart both at the same time.  “No,” you say, and reach out and then flinch yourself back away again, because what if he don’t want your touch, if he sees what they did to you now?  What if he knows how they put a hate and hurt and want to destroy in your pusher, what if he don’t _want_ you anymore—? 

“Gamzee,” he starts, slow and sad-tired and quiet like he shouldn’t ever be, and he does know, he has to.  He knows.  He sees you, broken and worthless like you are.  He’s leaving you.  “…listen, I—”

“I can be good still,” you say, and it comes from you desperate and small.  Karkat stops and looks up at you and meets you eye to eye for the first time, eyes all wide and mouth still open to talk, froze where he was at.  “Swear, I’ll—c-can be good to you still, I can—I’m not broke all the way, please just—”

His face does something open and hurt like the words were a stab to him.  He comes to you and shuts your stupid, babbling mouth with his hands on your cheeks.  For a second he just looks at you, touches you, traces at the flutterflaps of your eyes, all bruised up from not enough sleep, and he soothes them shut.  The very edge of your paint he touches tickling-soft, and then strokes at your ears, rubs his hot fingers past your fins until you want to just motherfucking _sob_ of it.  He talks to you at being cruel, and then he makes like to leave you and touches you so pale.  You couldn’t ever dream on doing cruelty like that.  That’s more than you can bear.

“ _You were always good,_ ” Karkat sighs, rough and angry and hurt, and scrubs at his tired eyes.  “Fuck.  It’s not you that’s the problem, Gamzee, come on.  I just…this guy has too much power over you.  It’s freaking me out.  I don’t _ever_ want that pestilent excuse for corpsemeat to get his hooks in you again, but the longer he has you in there talking at you, the…the more you feel…” he thins down his lips, finishes off, “…not like you.”

You come up hard on that despite how bad you want him, no fucking concern for how bad you wanna please and agree at him right now.  “Fuck that noise,” you say, still all thick and hurting but prickled at him too.  “He ain’t got _shit_ on me—”

“I bet your matesprit would say the same thing about his dreams,” Karkat says, and you could swear you feel your ribs creak as he reaches in you and tears your thorax open with his eyes, as he pushes ruthless into you and lays his hands on what he sees.  Pale and soft moirallegiance may look sometimes but there’s nothing to cut like diamond.

“That’s…different,” you say, and can’t look at him in the eyes.  “Those are what he could’ve been like, that’s all, he just don’t like to think on what they wanted to make him—”

You hear your own words and trail off into quiet.  _They didn’t break me.  I’m not what they wanted._

Karkat looks at you, and maybe he sees how deep he cut in you because he breathes out and he relents.  You can almost feel him let you go, let you close back away again, let you ease back to yourself.  Your insides still feel raw. 

“…I’m not asking you to stop,” he says, and touches your face, runs his fingers again through your hair and you realize as he does it that your thoughtsponge _aches,_ from jaw to horntips you’re a pounding, throbbing waste.  Even after he pushes so hard at you, you can’t but not lean into his hand and close your eyes, let yourself groan at how warm his palm is.  “Just…don’t let him goad you.  Okay?”

“I…” you should—you should talk about it, you should, you really fuckin’ should.  You should answer back at the concern in the way a brother looks at you, how the motherfuck you even really feel—but messiahs, you’re so tired.  “…best friend,” you say again, small and breaking, and press into his hand.

“Sleep,” he soothes at you, “Sleep, you awful lanky piece of shit, we’ll handle it in the nighttime like mature adults.”  He kisses your brainbox, and some of the ache eases just a touch.  “…sleep.”

\--

You sleep.

\--

Kurloz is sitting with you in the starlight.  Moons and planets and stars go spinning slow past outside the windows, the big glass spans and stretches up at the top of the _Dark Carnival_.  Kurloz watches you as you look out.  His head is bare and his—and his eyes—and his _paint_ —and his wrists are painted—

You come to realization of who you’re sitting with slow and aching and horrible.  Motherfucker can’t hardly breathe with those eyes on him, can’t barely move when those big, cruel, painted hands are in grabbing distance.  You never saw him without Kurloz near, but you don’t see your matesprit now.  The shock is a poison in your gut, the sudden knowing that you’re not safe.  That for the longest time you haven’t been and he’s been there the whole and entire time as you sat not recognizing.  _Watching_ you.

“ _Khh_ ,” you say, half a gulped-back noise.  “…Kurloz?”

He don’t answer.  But Brother immortal laughs at you, soft and too fuckin’ familiar at your motherfucking sponge clots.

“Heard you figure you got a knowing of me now,” he says, and twists a claw in the air.  Around you, the star-watching deck turns dark and bright church banners and hundreds of lanterns come burning down from the far-off ceiling like a hundred falling stars.  You’re in the Big Top, and he gets down and comfortable all lounged out across the throne of the Grand Highblood, watching you with lazy, knife-sharp eyes.  “…sent by the Messiahs, you told him?  Warning and congratulation, me?  Some… _ghost story._ ”  He looks at you smiling.  “That how you figure?  I’m _flattered_ , little brother.”

“What are you doin’ here?”  You feel for your clubs—can’t find your goddamn sylladex, fuck, why’s it always gotta go like that in dreams?  Can’t ever find anything you need when you need it.  “You ain’t my daymare.”

“I’m from the mind of the most badass of motherfuckin’ dream-fuckers,” says Brother Immortal, and stands to smile at you.  “Might be living and breathing, me.  Might be a _real-ass motherfucker._ ”

“Back off,” you say, and feel his horror try to crawl up your spine.  Kurloz’s fear, his chucklevoodoos giving him claws and fangs.  “Leave the both of us alone, you dirty backward-ass heretic shitwad.”

“No need for bein’ so harsh at me.”  He cocks his head a little bit to one side, smiles Kurloz’s sweet smile at you.  “It’s you made me so strong just now.  He’s got a powerful fear in him what they did to you.  You aware?  He got a pit in his thorax a mile deep, all empty and cold.  A big motherfuckin’ scar in his soul.”

Fear tries to choke off at your voice.  The air is all red and green and flashing and you should be afraid, you should fuckin’—you should—

But you’re not.

He seems to hear it.  Feel it, see it, he seems to know he’s not getting out of you what he wants.  He stops smiling, his not-real thinkpan makes use of Kurloz’s power and pushes all rough and round at you.  His fear lashes out at you, trying to get claws in you, pulling and hooking and tugging.  But you’ve had his hooks in your soul before, you’ve fuckin’ _felt_ that sickly-ass compelling and you want FUCK-ALL of it.  You put your horns down and look at him unkind and unafraid, and feel _fury_.

“Now ain’t _you_ a change?”  He says it soft, like to himself.  Ganderbulbs rove over you, considering now, and his stature seems less so.  You push at your horns, feel the hum and burn of your own ‘voodoos rise up to meet him. 

“He’s made a real thing of you in his head,” you say, and you don’t change yourself, but when you stand up straighter you stand almost so tall as him.  “But you’re not a real thing.  You can’t fuckin’ hurt me.  You’re not like _them._ ”

“They _are_ me,” he sneers, and his teeth are so long and sharp and now he tries to _menace_ you?!  This _fucker,_ after the real and actual cult did so cruel by you, and he thinks he can put suffering on your pan like he does your matesprit?  Kurloz made hurt to the cult and they took root of fear in his pan, but you were fucking _hurt_ by the cult and like actual messiahs’-damned FUCK they’re putting a fear in you now. 

“No,” you say, “They’re trolls.  You’re a fuckin’ _nothing._   You got no more to you than the goddamn dark does!”

The air around you changes.  Karkat, chained arms wide and head hanging, with the cult’s spiraled shapes cut in his chest in mutant red as bare-headed heretics drag their filthy paws through his blood and paint their faces and their wrists with it.  Your brothers and sisters as who you love so fierce and dear all on their knees to you, you standing at their head, demanding their worship.  You feel it tug at you a second, shock wants to take you and horror tries to turn your acid sac.  But Karkat is somewhere elsewhere, somewhere real, he’s curled up at your side with his hands on your real self, loving even your broken-ass thinkpan and your bruised-up pusher.  Your kin are somewhere elsewhere, some of them dreaming and some of them waking and some praying to truer gods. You push that off.

“I motherfucking _renounce,_ ” you grit out, and step forward to him. Around you, the fake-ass fakey pictures break and bend.  “Stop hiding.”

He snarls again, but there’s less edge to it.  He looks less and less the matesprit you know; his face is thinner, his shoulders less broad.  His body less steady and solid and more gangle and unease with itself. He shakes it off next second, and he fixes you with eyes flashing purple and you see— 

You lie spread on an altar, but instead of asking you _prophesy_ they silence you with lips and fronds and golden gags, instead of worshipping touches they tear into you slow and loving.  Your blood stains their claws.  The church worships and hurts and those you got your care on of put their whole selves in hurting you, tender like Kurloz does but all the church together, putting their all in making you feel—

How fucking _dare_ they.  How DARE he make play on your love of your family?!

“You think you’re so mother _fucking SMART,_ ” you snarl, and push forward again toward that face all painted in blasphemous red.  “I _renounce_ you.  _Brother._ ” 

You sneer the word with a hate you came only just these nights to know—hate like you never did used to have, hate for everything he means to you.  He means worship heedless of your word and wish.  He means thirst and suffering.  He means Kurloz, shaken and diminished and holding you like he’s afraid you’ll vanish through his claws like smoke. 

“Show me your real face.”

He’s no taller than you now.  You stand matched to each other.  You’ve never been so, face to face and horn-height matched to each other—there’s less turns to his curving horns, they all but match yours, like he was…

You stop.  Your slow, dreaming-muddled thinkpan finally makes at thinking, throws some thoughts right at your motherfucking face, and you think, and you look, and you…start to get a littlest motherfucking inkling.  Things start to fall just a little bit into place.

“…well _fuck_ me,” you say.  “I got it all turned around wrong.”

He stops, about to snarl.  Frowns, and it’s a face so familiar.  Kurloz’s face, under all the paint and the strangeness of his bared head. 

“You’re no trial,” you say, and some of the anger fades off of you in the realizing.  “You’re no daymare monster.  You’re not sent from outside.”

He tries to step back as you come forward that last step, but you reach out and grab hold of him, press your frond to his thorax and don’t let him look from you as he shudders.

“ _Show me your face,_ ” you tell him again, and it’s still with hate but there’s an edge now. You got knives for your words, and you aim to carve open.  “Kurloz.”

“ _That’s not my name,_ ” he says, and now is his voice less commanding, now it has a noise to it that’s all but pleading.  Hate is still in you, rage still takes you, but as he stops trying to push you you start to feel otherwise as well.  You start to feel something more…familiar.  Something you’re more accustomed at. 

“You’d claim at being him,” you say.  “Of knowing what he is, whole and entire, you claim you know what he wants?  If you’d say all that you’ll take his _motherfucking name._   Kurloz Makara.”

You feel him change.  Feel the last of the fear ease off you.  When you step back, you stand across of a troll only sweeps above your age.  His paint is simple and young as yours, sharp under his cheekbones and slashed across his lips.  His eyes are wide.  His eyes are dark, his eyes are _afraid_.  Something tight and hurting-sweet stabs through your thorax; he’s all but your age, your strong matesprit so sweetly brutal at you.  He’s your Kurloz, but twisted up. 

“…It’s what I want,” he says, and there’s a tone to him like he’d beg you.  Like he’s looking for absolution.  “I want to hurt—”

“Hey.”  You can see the flicker of the red paint, trying to cover his face up again.  “Don’t you go turning away from me now.  Hey, eyes on me.”

“I’m the _Grand Highblood_ ,” he says, a single snapping pretense of pride, and you see that he has the knife of Messiah’s Mercy in his hand.  You see the scene around you change.  A troll lies between you, lies on the ground with the Death’s Head paint on his empty face.  The face isn’t one you know, a brother with heavy horns and brutal features all scarred.  Kurloz looks down at him and shudders from the sight.  “I killed him.”

“You had to,” you tell him, and you close the space he opened between you.  Put your hands on him again, and feel the note of truth under the touch.  “Kurloz.  You’re dreaming, big brother.”

“He wants no part of me,” says the dreaming shade of your matesprit, desperately bitter.  “Heretic pain-hungry grasping slut, never satisfied but with the whole church bowing to my knees—”  and for a second you think he’s talking at you, but then you hear the words he says, you see the way he turns in on himself all claws and fury.  His paint is red again.  “—trash and motherfucking _refuse_ , dreaming of you as a piece of flesh to torture like the cult ever did—”

And you think you understand.

“There’s no ‘him’,” you say. 

He stops dead.  He stops everything, freezes in one place except how his eyes flick up to look at you.  The red fades from his paint. 

“What you want’s a dangerous thing but you got it all wrapped up tight,” you tell him.  “What you doubt, what you fight with yourself over, you can talk out with us, brother.  You gotta stop _hurting_ yourself for it.”

 “I’m not him,” he says, and you don’t know if he denies as Brother Immortal or as himself.  Maybe he doesn’t know either.  “I’m not—” but he’s all shake and shiver.  “—he wants—I want—”

“I know what you want.”

“I’d make a ruin of you,” he says.

“You can want that.”

“I don’t want—” He can’t stay a shape, he changes and shifts—Brother Immortal returns a moment, towering and red-painted and bare-headed, and then he’s your Kurloz, hair all wild and eyes wide.  Then he’s back again to that youngest shape, the place where the two of him suffered and were split off each other in splinters; Kurloz, barely made Grand Highblood and facing the Cult of Flesh with eyes wide and fearful.  “I can’t want—no.  I want you safe.  I want you mine.”

“You can want that too.”

He makes a noise hating and brutal—lashes out claws and knocks your head to one side.  You feel him rip through your paint on one cheek, feel the real-unreal trickle of blood down your neck, like your mind don’t quite make sense of what it should feel like.

“ _I want to use you like meat and flesh,_ ” he hisses, and he looms at you a second, Immortal again.  “ _I want you crawling naked at my hallowed feet and broken to my every whim, collared and bound and tortured and_ crying _—_ ”

“I know.”

He halts himself.  For another second he’s your matesprit again.  His face twists, and you’ve never see Kurloz make such a face in the real and waking world, like he’s gutted.  Like you just slit his throat.  You wonder if his body shifts in his ‘coon.  If he curls up alone in the cold slime like he’s tryin’ to hide, as his pan and pusher lie bare to you.

“You can want that,” you say again.  “It’s okay.  You wanting that.”

“I fucking _don’t_!” he snaps, and it’s all but a yell and he means it so hard it shakes.  “I want you in my arms forever, I want to make you gentle and kiss you in evenings, lift up your bright soul—little one—” and the naming breaks, the precious words are too delicate for his shaking chatterbox.  “—I’m no good for you.  I’m not right, pusher and—and _monstrous_ motherfucking soul.  Kin-killing parasite on the Church’s forgiveness—I got no right to you.”

“Shh,” you say, not pale but pure for the flush love of him.  “Big brother, gentle on yourself with that.  Easy with all this fuckin’ harshness now.  No more daymares now.”

He spooks a little at that, like he all but forgot he was dreaming.  For a second, he fades away from you—almost waking.

“I’m gonna come up and see you,” you tell him.  “I’ll wake up and—”

“No,” he says.  “No, you stay right at where you’re at.”

“But—”

“Can’t speak to your face,” he says.  “Not now.”  And then, “—I’m not him.”

“He’s what you want.”  And he flinches from that like the words are a horror.  “No—no fear, big brother.  No fear now.  You got wants.  You ain’t ever let those out, you don’t let them make hurt unwanted.  That’s what you told me, right?  _You don’t hurt unwanted._ ”

“I could,” he says.  “Any night, I could.  I want to.”

_Gamzee._

Something drags at you.  You lose your focus for a second, and his paint flashes red. 

“I’m coming up to see you,” you say again. 

“I don’t want you to,” he says back, but he’s barely your age and you can hear in his voice how he doesn’t expect to win this fight.

_Gamzee?_

“In a second,” you say, out loud but not in the right place—something is shaking you.  You’ll lose your grip soon.  He’s looking at you strange, not sure what you mean—you look back to him, focus your pan again.  “…I know you don’t want,” you say.  “But I’m coming up anyway.  Sometimes you don’t get what you want, brother.”

“Sometimes that’s a good thing,” he says, and closes his eyes.  He’s fading too, both of you going more distant, easing away.  “…I don’t—I have to think.”

“You can think with me there,” you say, and you can’t see him any more, he’s all but gone and you’re shouting silent through the dark.  “Don’t do fuck-all without me!  Wait for me!”

“Wake _up!_ ”

Karkat slaps you across the face.  You come back gasping, startled from your drifting dreams by the shock, and for a second you’re back in yourself but your body is strange and far off from you.  See yourself lying in the slime, all twisted up and head back, Karkat leaned over you shaking you.  Your eyes glow from the inside out in Messiahs’ holy colors, staring on off past Karkat and into dreams. 

And then he hits you again, and you snap back to yourself with a crack like bone breaking, sit up and look him in the eye.

“We’re goin’ up,” you say, and push up out of the slime, scraping it off with your hands, already moving for the entrance to the ‘coon.  Karkat scrambles to follow, eyes wide.  “We gotta go see him.”

“See— _who?!_ ”  Karkat slides down the side of your ‘coon in a slimy trail, groans disgust at the slime and grabs a pair of your pants off the floor to scrub at himself.  You shake off slime on the floor, scrape away the worst of it, pull on a pair of pants and take off toward the door.  “The—Uumbrage--?!”

“What?”  Fuck, what?  “No!  Kurloz, we gotta go see Kurloz.”

“We—why?!”  Karkat drags at your hand as you walk and you growl for a second, reach out and pick him full up off the ground.  He squeaks and punches you right in the gills, and you choke but keep on going.  “Put me down!  What are you talking about you insane heap of clown-shit?!  Fuckin’— _talk_ to me!”

“I’ll tell you,” you say, and don’t put him down as you half-run out through the door and take off up the decks of the silent Big Top, heading for the feeders’ blocks.  “I will, swear I will, but we gotta get up there.  I’ll tell you on the way!”

\--

You get through the most of the dream on your way up, for all Karkat is still making little bits of words like “—wait—” and “No, hang on—” and “Whoa, would you just—fucking explain something, for once in your life you ridiculous honktard—” but you’re there and you’re out of time to talk.  You put him down, key your code in at the door, and the two of you go pushing inside.

Kurloz is sitting up when you come in.  He looks up at you, face all bare and eyes tired, and then back down.  Closes his eyes again. 

“…I asked you to stay put,” he says, slow and tired.

“What the actual fuck is going on?”  Karkat says.

“Dreaming shit,” says Kurloz.  “No concern on you,” and then, to you, “—why’d you haul him up here?”

“I need him,” you say.  “And he was there and he wasn’t gonna not come with me, big brother are you okay?”

Karkat preens a little bit, for all he still got no fucking clue what’s going on.  Remembers next second all his confusions and questions and settles down again.  “No but seriously,” he says.  “What am I supposed to do, exactly?”

“I’m telling you, you got nothing _to_ do,” Kurloz says.  “Go back down.”

“ _No_?”  Karkat’s not really all wanting to be here, but even more than that he wants to not do like he’s told.  He’s drawing up now, horns down, confused and mostly naked but pissed as a motherfucker.  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on—”

Kurloz’s eyes meet yours a second, and you see that flash of something young and dark in them.  But then Karkat keeps going.

“…but I really don’t give a fuck,” says Karkat, and you can see how that relieves.  Kurloz closes his eyes a second, his mouth quirks up at the corner.  “I’m just here to get a good look at your face so I can hold it over your horns for a couple of weeks.”

“Fuck you,” says Kurloz, but he’s smiling now again, exhausted and full of things not said but smiling.  “My face is a goddamn delight and you should be beggin’ thanks on your knees for getting’ to lay peep-stalks on it.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Karkat, and he gets up closer, close enough to lean casual on Kurloz’s shoulder.  Even with Kurloz sitting and Karkat on his feet he has to lean up a little to do it.  “I’m practically _hemorrhaging_ gratitude right out the nook.  Oh wait, no, that’s not gratitude.”

Kurloz raises up his eyebrows, and you put your ganderbulbs elsewhere in a real fuckin’ hurry because holy shit you didn’t need to think about that issue.  Comfort of quadrants is one thing but if they’re gonna start making out over your head you’re gonna have to abscond pretty damn fast. 

“Well fuck,” he says, “—knew you liked to look at me, but if I’d figured it was gonna get you so warmed up for me I’d make bare face at you more frequent-like.”

“Wh—” Karkat stops, stammers, realizes what he said and goes red all up to his horns.  “No!  No?!  I was—rage!  Rage is what’s hemorrhaging!  You absolute _fucker!_ ”

“ _Kurloz_ ,” you whine at him, and he laughs and squeezes you and lets the matter lie.  Pulls out a skull and…holds it.  Hesitates with it. 

“…You got a powerful thinkpan under those handsome horns of yours, little brother,” he says, serious now, quieter.  “Think you’d like as got my whole motherfucking complement of power, with extras.  By messiahs’ mercy.”

“Amen,” you say, startled.  “Uh…fuck, bro, I dunno.  Just dreaming.”

“Yeah, well.”  Kurloz smiles, but it’s fake and tight.  “You got that Makara dreamnode and fuckin’ all.  Just dreaming is some heavy shit.”

“Okay, I said I didn’t care but this sounds like something that’s going to fuck up my moirail.”  Karkat’s little mutant fins are all flared up wide, perked and interested, and it’s the cutest motherfucking thing.  “Did you fucking…dream-share or something?  This sounds like a whole planet’s-worth of pan-fucking.”

“I…” Kurloz’s voice falters just the barest second, and his fronds squeeze at you tight in the hesitating.  Then he goes on.  “I just got full fucking awareness of how I could turn out, that’s all.  Could take on that crown the Cult put on me, _kin-killer._   Any night.  Any brother or sister, my own blood, if I wanted.”  His voice lowers, all edged and sawing whine of hate.  “… _and I do want._ ”

“Yeah, well, you won’t.”  Karkat grabs up the skull Kurloz took out, frowns at it for a second and then bashes at it with the hilt of his sickle until it cracks open.  Pulls out armored regalia and shoves it into Kurloz’s hands.  “Was that seriously all that was bothering you?  What the fuck.  You’ve got fucking ludicrous amounts of self-control, honk-globes.  It’s one of the unfortunate things that make you a passable leader.”

“I’m all but melting at the sweetness,” Kurloz says, dry, and you laugh at seeing him happy again, distracted from the harshness of the moment.  “You got some things to recommend you too, little spitfire motherfucker as you are.  Tight little nook, for one.”

“Yeah, my nook is pretty awesome,” says Karkat, and throws a look at you.  “But we’re not gonna _talk_ about it, because Gamzee looks like he’s about to combust.”

You are so fuckin’ hot in the face, it is true.  Can feel your heartbeat in your little janky fins and cervical gills.  “Best friend,” you say, plaintive as fuck, and he snorts at you and shoves past Kurloz’s arm to kiss your nose all soft and pale.  The urge to bite him is a sudden and strong snap—you’re getting better.  You breathe deep and ride it out, hold onto Kurloz’s arm so tight for a second he looks down at you in worry.  You make yourself stay still, no claws and no fangs, and a second later it’s gone again.

“Besides,” Karkat is saying, not noticing how for a second you made war at yourself.  “You’re using sex to distract me from what’s actually going on.  You said there was some creepy daymare, but it…what, it had a mind of its own?  Do your powers do that?”

“Fuck-all knows what our powers do,” Kurloz says, no longer so amused.  “Messiah-given strength of pan, what came to me from hatching—still learn a new thing every couple hundred of sweeps.”  He frowns.  “Never met another troll I could talk to so clear in dreaming though.”

“Well.”  Karkat waves that off.  “Ancestor and descendant, right.  But he jumped from your dreams to Gamzee’s?”

“No, okay.”  You had it all figured out so clear in your dream, but it’s harder to put words around out here.  You try.  “It’s just…wants, but you can’t talk at me about them as you, because a brother’s got too deep a love to want what he wants, right?  So…that red-paint motherfucker says it for you.”  You see Kurloz’s lips twist up bitter at the thought, but you knew it so sure in the dream, you can’t start at doubting it now.  “He’s you,” you say, and he hisses soft through his fangs.  “—no, even go _starting_ on that shit, don’t look at me like that.  Just—let him be.  Let yourself _be_ about it.  That’s all I’m saying.”

“Let myself be,” he repeats, dry, and looks up and away from you with that twist still in his mouth, twisted-up and not really smiling.  “Sounds like a fucking plan.”

“Hey, don’t sass him,” Karkat says, and he sounds so motherfucking _indignant_ a brother can’t hardly be countenancing it without laughing.  You put your face in Kurloz’s neck and laugh a little, and his arms that went loose around you squeeze a little bit again.  Karkat sighs and talks at you instead.  “You could stand to take your own advice sometimes, you big bulge-horned lunatic.” 

“Hey, my horns are fucking handsome,” you say, half-injured and half-laughing, and Karkat makes like to growl and grabs at them, tweaking his fingers round to rub deep in the roots, which, _fuck_ , not even fair.  He sniggers as you stagger limp onto Kurloz’s arms, gasping out a piece of a purr—Kurloz growls over your head and you hear Karkat go “—oh, no, you huge fucker don’t even _try_ it—” and know Kurloz is making a grab at Karkat’s horns for revenge.  After torture and jamming and dreams of all kinds you feel Kurloz cool-warm in front of you and Karkat burning hot behind you, and the feeling of how goddamn _right_ it is is startling almost.  Feels strange to not feel strange for a second.  Feels wrong to feel right.

“…look at you, sleepy again already.”  Kurloz says soft to you, and nips your ear with a fang to make you shudder awake again from where you were wandering in your thinkpan.  “You go wearing yourself out on us, where are you gonna get your rest at?  Be _easy_ at yourself, you little hypocrite.”

“Mmhm.”  God, and you wouldn’t ever say it to their faces, not when they believe in you so good, but this is a time where you would fuckin’ _kill_ for a slime pie again.  It’s when things are good you feel it hardest— _this is gonna end, this will all go bad again, but a little bit of_ slime…when things are bad you suffer and you pray, but when you feel good it’s a fuckin’ drug to you. Can’t go without.   You just love them so  _motherfucking_ much. 

“You’re wandering again, dumb-ass,” Karkat says soft, and traces one horn again.  He’s gotta kneel on Kurloz’s legs to reach up to your horns, and Kurloz shifts his knees around to watch Karkat yelp and cling onto you, all but falling off the couch.  “Whoa!  Hey, I’m trying to help your matesprit, do you fuckin’ _mind_?”

“…did good?” you say, startling even to yourself, and feel them both go still to hear you.  Messiahs but it feels good, to be listened at so hard.  Feels good the way Kurloz shifts his weight a little to lean you back and forth, back and forth like…like some ancient, far-off memory of resting on salty-wet white fur while the waves—while your dad—  “I mean, I—did I—?”

 “You did good _,_ ” Kurloz murmurs to you, and this time when the hard, bright, good feeling snaps up through you, you don’t fight it.  Let it shiver your bones and burn through your thinkpan and wipe you clean for a second as he rocks you back and forth like waves.  “You fuckin’ told him what’s what.  Softest, most flushed little heart of mine—”

“Stop being romantic, you creaky old shit-relic,” Karkat grumbles behind you, and you smile between the two of them and let yourself be moved.


End file.
